The Zetzner Lull

LULL, Raymund.

Strasburg, for Heirs of Lazarus Zetzner, 1651.

Opera ea quae ad inventam ab ipso artem universalem [with:] Clavis Artis Lullianae, et Verae Logices.

8vo. 1. (8) ff., 1109, (1) pp., (20) ff., 1 blank, with 3 folding tables, 1 folding table with 6 volvelles uncut. 2. (4) ff., 150 pp., 1 leaf with two uncut volvelles. Bound in contemporary flexible vellum, title block printed on spine. A small patch to head of spine exposed, vellum rather soiled. Right fore-edge of some leaves dog-eared; several quires loosening. Some worming in gutter margin. Light browning and foxing generally seen in this volume, but all in all, a good copy.

Scarce Strasburg edition of the collected works of Lull, including commentaries of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, and here with an important 17th-century presentation of the Lullian Ars by the encyclopedist Johann Alsted. Both were influential on Leibniz, Commenius and other 17th-century encyclopedists.

"The most distinctive characteristic of Lull's Art is clearly its combinatory nature, which led to both the use of complex semi-mechanical techniques that sometimes required figures with separately revolving concentric wheels... and to the symbolic notation of its alphabet. These features justify its classification among the forerunners of both modern symbolic logic and computer science, with its systematically exhaustive consideration of all possible combinations of the material under examination, reduced to a symbolic coding." - Pring Mill in DSB, viii.549

* 1) Krivatsy 7187; Duveen p. 372 (1609), a reprint of the present edition; Rogent & Dur஬ Lul-lianes, 233; Young, p. 215; Pring-Mill in DSB viii.549 ; 2) Krivatsy 253; Young, p. 7; Charles Webster in DSB I.126-7.

Price: $4,500.00