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This small label tells us that the book was bound (relié) by la Veuve Gueffier, or the Widow Gueffier, at rue Gallande n. 61. It was not uncommon for widows to take over the professions of their deceased husbands, but what is unusual about Mme Gueffier is that she also made playing cards. Bookbinders were often more than just that, they could also be involved in the selling and sometimes printing of books, but this binding is testament to a truly broad range of work that Widow Gueffier was undertaking.

It is not clear what happened to the book immediately after it was bound sometime around the year 1800, but within the first decade or so of the twentieth century, it was in the possession of bibliophile George Dunn, whose bookplate is on the inside of the front board.

Dunn amassed a significant collection of incunabula and medieval manuscripts at his home near Maidenhead in the UK and, when he died in 1912, this was sold in a series of sales between 1913 and 1917. It is probable that it was at one of these sales that this book was acquired by its next owner, the Earl of Cromer. Furthermore, a note on Cromer’s bookplate itself tells us that it was designed by J. F. Badeley in 1912, so very likely the book was with Cromer sometime after 1912, and before his death in 1917.

Between 1917 and 1955, there is another gap in the known provenance of the book, but the next bookplate confirms where it ended up by the close of the 1940s: in the collection of Lucius Wilmerding, a New York book collector, whose bookplate is in the top right-hand corner of the inside of the board.

Over the course of the next thirty years, the book passed through the hands of other New York collectors, Saul Cohn, and Lucien Goldschmidt, before it was acquired by the dealer Alexandre P. Rosenberg, before the end of the 1980s. His bookplate is the last on this board, and it is especially interesting because it was designed for fourteen-year-old Rosenberg by the artist Pablo Picasso, a friend of the family. Rosenberg continued to use the plate throughout his life.

Unfortunately, with the eighteenth-century binding provided by Mme Gueffier, and the book’s original endleaves removed, it is not yet possible to know the earlier, fifteenth-century provenance of INC126. INC127, however, a copy of Eusebius’ De evangelica praeparatione, translated into Latin by Trapezuntius and printed in Venice by Leonhardus Aurl in 1473 is in its original fifteenth-century binding and thus preserves fascinating details of its earlier history.

For me at least, the most interesting part of the provenance of this book can be found, again, on the inside of its front cover, where you can see the binder has pasted a paper manuscript fragment.

It was a common practice for binders of this period to strengthen their bindings with whatever waste parchment or paper was available to them, whether it contained manuscript text or not. This fragment is a part of a document, written in German, and dated to 1473 in Vienna in Austria. This has a few implications for what we can know about the book’s binding. One is that it has to have been made after 1473 (although some readers may have spotted that we know this anyway, since it is the date of the book’s imprint), but we also can be fairly sure that it was made in the area around Vienna, because that is where the fragment was discarded. It is interesting then that in the time between its printing and binding, the book travelled from Venice to Vienna, receiving annotations from a reader on the way. We might expect this kind of international, cross-continental book trade to be feature of the modern era, but this medieval book shows that this is not the case.

After receiving its binding in Vienna, the book travelled again, this time to the town of Ingolstadt in southern Germany. We can see this from the ownership inscription at the bottom of the first leaf.

This inscription, in a fifteenth-century hand, reads ‘Iste liber est Magistri Joannis plueml’ Ingoldstatensis… Anno domini 1492’, showing that this book belonged to Johannes Pluemel of Ingolstadt in the year 1492. Pluemel matriculated at the University of Ingolstadt in 1472 and served both the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Theology in the final decades of the fifteenth century. It is clear that Pluemel cared about his book, adding not only this inscription to mark his ownership, but also his coat of arms, a similar inscription at the end of the book, and some red titles to structure the text. His library has been well documented, although INC127 is a new addition to the listing, and across his books, Pluemel can be seen showing the same care, with the inclusion of his coat of arms in most of them.¹

It is not clear what happened to this book after it left Pluemel’s collection. There is evidence that he gave away some of his books while he was still working at Ingolstadt, and the relatively high number of different annotating hands in this book could be explained by its use by several students in a university context. But it is also possible that Pluemel took this book with him when he left Ingolstadt in 1508 to preach at Bruchsal, about 240km to the west, and that it was from there that the book was passed on to its next owner.

INC122, INC126, and INC127 are just three of the books that I was working on at the Laskaridis Foundation, and it was so exciting to uncover more of their history, and that of other books. Ownership marks and other marks of use from over the last five hundred years were crucial in enabling me to do this, and the internship has been invaluable in broadening my experience of incunables beyond simply my PhD thesis.

I am very grateful to Dr Vera Andriopoulou, Kleopatra Kyrtata, and Aggeliki Papadopoulou for making me feel so welcome at the Foundation, and for the time and support they gave in supervising and training me.

Thanks are due too to librarians at the Gennadius Library and the National Library of Greece for kindly showing me their collections, and to Dr Cristina Dondi and the CERL board for awarding me this grant.

• Dennis E. Rhodes, ‘The Library of Johann Plümel’ in Incunabula : studies in fifteenth-century printed books presented to Lotte Hellinga, ed. by Martin Davies (London: British Library, 1999), pp. 231-41.