I’ve recently been researching 15th century copies of Johannes Hartlieb’s German translation of Andrea Capellanus’ “De Amore“. My plan is to try to work out if any includes a predecessor of the hand-crossing drawing that appeared in the three 1482/1484 incunabula…
…which, if you recall, is the drawing that Koen Gheuens cleverly suggested might well be linked with a Diebold Lauber workshop drawing and the Voynich Manuscript’s Gemini zodiac roundel…
This is all going OK so far (I now have Alfred Karnein’s magisterial book on the subject, and a copy of his 1985 book should land on my doorstep soon), and as always I’ll post more on this in due course.
However, there’s one other German “De Amore” described by Frank Fürbeth in his more recent book “Johannes Hartlieb: Untersuchungen zu Leben und Werk” that I can’t find anything about. This manuscript, which doesn’t appear in either of Karnein’s books, was (says Fürbeth) Number 3 in American antiquarian bookseller Philip J. Pirages’ 1985 catalogue. But when I emailed the bookseller, Phil Pirages himself kindly replied, saying that he had no record of any such book.
It would seem that something a little odd is going on here. 🙁
Can I therefore please ask any Cipher Mysteries reader who just happens to have easy access to a stupendously good academic library with a copy of Frank Fürbeth’s book “Johannes Hartlieb: Untersuchungen zu Leben und Werk” (currently £80+ on bookfinder.com, somewhat out of my range, sadly) to photograph or scan pages 62 and 63 for me? (This is, according to Google, where Fürbeth discusses the Pirages manuscript.) Thanks very much!
Note: I believe that the 2011 edition of the book is simply a reprint of the 1992 original, but please check to see if these two pages do mention Philip J. Pirages, thanks!
Nick: I don’t know if I am missing something, but a brief Googling threw up:
https://kisslibrary.net/book/5FF6CEA88CD4C64A7C34
where you can download a pdf of the book for $5.99 I believe, maybe I have missed something or were you looking for a free copy?
I don’t know if there is a free pdf online. To be honest I think locating the book and photocopying the 2 pages of the book you want would cost most people more than $6 in lost time.
Mark: I suspect it may be one of the endless stream of fake PDF download sites out there, but I’ll have a closer look. The price I saw quoted for an official PDF was £78, just so you know. :-/
Nick: It could well be bogus, I don’t know, though the free preview, first chapter looks bonafide, but as to the rest I don’t know.
Nick: The internet says this website sells pirated books. So it is sounds likely that it is the genuine book though I can’t be certain, however it was most likely obtained illegally by the people selling the book.
Is this what you’re looking for? https://books.google.de/books?id=X-AZmEqwvdoC&pg=PA63
Thomas: yes, only Google won’t let me see it. 🙁
If you can see it (and p.62 as well!), can you please email me screenshots? Thanks very much! nickpelling at nickpelling dot com
@Nick
I emailed you a copy.
Assuming that Thomas will send you the screen shots…
Here’s another reference:
http://www.handschriftencensus.de/7314
@Nick
I saw it too, at page 25 is ready finisch. He really does not want to show that anymore.
@Nick
I can not see page 59-61. Page 62 is visible, but only text. Is that OK?
@Nick
Have you s.62 + 63 sent.
Everyone: thanks for all the scans and screengrabs you made and sent through, I now have everything I need, which is really great! 🙂 🙂 🙂
I haven’t looked at this in any detail, but I think I saw a suggestion that also this manuscript:
http://www.handschriftencensus.de/18567
is a relevant one that was not treated in Fürbeth.
Rene: yes, it looks like I’m going to have to read Daniel Könitz (2013) as well. Is there no end to it? :-/
Are you primarily interested in illustrations? So far I have not seen any indication that either of these is illustrated. In particular, for the Pirages copy it only mentions decorated initials and rubrication….
Nick: You say->
“yes, only Google won’t let me see it.”
I guess that must be a regional issue, but presumably if you use a VPN then you can get around that. However I would think you know that, so maybe I am missing something.
Mark: at the time I wrote that, I wasn’t sure whether it was a regional restriction or a global restriction by Google. But we have a happy ending now. 🙂
Rene: mainly yes, but I would also like to build up as complete an overall transmission chart as I can, so that I can give something like a definitive answer to the question.
Nick: Along time ago I wanted quite a lot of pages from a book and what I noticed is that different pages were hidden depending on whether one visited google.ca (Canada) or other google regional websites, so I managed to get all the pages I wanted from the different websites; now I imagine that is no longer the case, though I haven’t checked. A slightly arduous approach is to grab text a few sentences at a time through google and then feed the end sentences back to get the next few sentences(sometimes you may need to guess the next word though often this is not difficult.)
Of course the main problem that we face is simply when the document has not been unloaded or scanned anywhere to the internet.
Now the author will understand why his royalty check for the year was only $150.
JKP: I’m not sure that the publisher asking 100 USD or so for an ebook is going to make the author rich either. :-/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floris_and_Blancheflour
Probably not, Nick, but I’m assuming the steep increase in prices in the last few years is partly a reaction to the vast increases in ebook piracy. They sell a dozen copies and one of those buyers re-distributions millions of additional copies through the Web (usually through a yearly subscription pirate service).
I’m not sure the publishers are trying to solve the problem in the right way. Big companies are not very nimble and the small ones don’t have enough venture capital to keep them afloat until they find solutions, but I do know they are struggling and that royalties in many book genres is down to 1/100th of what they were paying a decade ago. It’s the same with magazines. They used to pay $0.25 to $0.50 per word, sometimes more for a feature article. Now many of them are asking the same writers to work for free.
Automation is inevitable, and people have to be willing to re-train, but I was recently reading a old book (written in the early 90s) by a smart guy who was with InfoWorld who made a lot of correct predictions about the future of the computer industry, but the one thing he (and many others) apparently never anticipated was how badly the arts (including the boutique software companies) would be gutted by piracy.
I think about this because I talk to students when they come to the door selling chocolate bars or advocating for the environment or medical insurance. In just a few years, the conversations have dramatically changed. They used to talk about their future, their ambitions—big smiles on their faces (that’s why I enjoy talking to them). Now they talk about being crammed into tiny basement rooms with no windows with three other people because it’s all they can afford (there have always been homeless in my community, but now there are blanket tents under blackberry brambles in almost every nook and cranny of the city).
Most of my friends are programmers/scientists and artists (writers, photographers, and musicians). Those in the high-piracy sectors have gone from earning modest livings to begging for money on Patreon. It’s never been easy, but there’s a big increase in how many of them are working in restaurants and food stores or struggling to find any work at all.
I honestly wonder what the under-20 crowd is going to do in a few years. Are they doomed to minimum-wage fast-food jobs or low-paid cubicle jobs working for mega-companies?
Anyway, I myself have lifted pages from Google books for research purposes if they were part of the visible preview, and being such an avid reader, I’ve possibly done it beyond “fair use” guidelines, but I do try to be cognizant of it, and to not abuse the privilege…. But it’s another matter when people use your site as a venue to spread information on how to get the whole book without paying for it. That doesn’t seem fair to the writers.
To JKP,
books from publishers like deGruyter (and others in the field) have always been extremely expensive due to their strictly limited editions for universities and a small amount of public libraries. They were never supposed to be available for a larger public or your bookseller next corner. For the authors the
question of (rather poor) royalties was less than negligible compared to the the chance of being pubslihed at all by such a famous publisher. I know that
from inside very well because I’ve worked for them as well as an editor and as an author. My annual royalty fee allows me to either buy two and a half books out of their stock or a luxury perfume (not in their basket). I prefer the latter.
The question of google plundering every book that has no clear copyright limits is another one and surely off topic here.
“But it’s another matter when people use your site as a venue to spread information on how to get the whole book without paying for it”
Six of one and half a dozen of the other. While I can see the point that taking information for public use without paying for it seems a bit unfair, in this sort of context it’s potentially driving others to read (and potentially buy) the same book….so while there’s no royalties directly from NP, it might (might) flow onto royalties from others (and perhaps as ultimate consumers of that information, the onus is ours to ensure the royalties flow)…
Just a thought.
Charlotte wrote: “The question of google plundering every book that has no clear copyright limits is another one and surely off topic here.”
Yes, I agree, and some that have clear copyrights, as well. The writers’ association has already had legal wrangles with them over this. They get slapped in court, they behave for a short while, and then they progressively expand their purview until there’s not much that isn’t shown.
There’s also an element of blackmail in these kinds of systems. A site gets big, and publishers need their books to be seen, the site offers certain “options” none of which are designed for the best interests of the publishers, and they have the choice of not being seen, or choosing A or B when the non-existent C would have been better (in other words, they are caught between a rock and a hard place).
But I won’t go into a long discussion on this. As you noted, it would surely go off-topic.
I just wanted to make a mention so that people remember that there are human beings behind this content, people who put years of study and time and effort into creating it (whether it be books, music, videos, or software or all the other things that are regularly pirated doesn’t matter) and simply taking it without a second thought (beyond what is fair use) is a trend I’ve noticed and I’m hoping we can step back once in a while and remember that actions have consequences and content-producers have bills to pay the same as everyone else.
It’s a nice thought, Bob, and I wished it worked that way but in reality, revenues are way way down.
Really weird, Nick.
This guy, and the story about Kraus and that librarian.
Maybe your question was a little too “fusty” for him?
Nick, now that you have the info, did Mr. Pirages not remember because it was bound with four other works? Did you get any farther along since?
Linda: I’m just working my way through Alfred Carnein’s second De Amore book, and am working out how best to write up what I’ve found even this far.
PS: I’m also thinking about publishing this kind of thing to either the Cryptology ePrint Archive – https://eprint.iacr.org/ – or CERN’s Zenodo – https://zenodo.org/ .
Nick – not to be troublesome but to share, I thought I’d let you know that I’m preparing a series of posts for ‘revisionist’ treating the folios which include that motif, and will be suggesting (with reasons and examples given) that the unusual gesture of crossed arms is specifically an allusion to the pair of Floire and Blancheflor as a not-quite-Christian pair, ‘twins’ and lovers. I’ll also suggest that the model for the Vms’ version was French or Spanish in origin and might have been first enunciated as early as the last quarter of the 12thC.
Cheers
Cheers