La Legatura Artistica in Italia Nei Secoli XV E XVI. Notizie ed Elenchi.

Florence: Fratelli Alinari, Instituto di Edizioni 1960 One of 500 sets printed at the Stamperia Valdonega in Verona. Original half blue morocco over blue linen with gilt-lettered spine. Top edges gilt. . Folio, three volumes. . Heavily illustrated and featuring over 1,500 bindings. The set is illustrated with two color frontispieces, three tipped-in color illustrations, numerous text illustrations, and nearly 1,000 collotype plates, including nine folding plates printed on both sides and fourteen double-page illustrations. Endpapers have minor offsetting. A few tiny spots to some boards and slipcases. Still, quite a fine set. Tammaro de Marinis (1878-1969) was a Neapolitan bibliographer, book collector, and binding scholar. He is considered by many to be the leading Italian bibliophile of the twentieth century. After the war, he devoted himself to his work as a bibliographer. He founded the Cento Amici del Libro ("One Hundred Friends of the Book") in Milan with Ugo Ojetti. De Marinis' La Legatura is deemed the authoritative work on fifteenth and sixteenth century Italian bookbindings, as it offers a tremendous amount of material on the subject. The result of close collaboration amongst the experts in the field, this heavily illustrated set contains thousands of detailed descriptions of books in public and private libraries in Europe and the United States with a prefatory essay on each city and indexes. All of the bindings are described in the letterpress section of each volume. This work also contains more than 3,000 meticulous descriptions of books.