[Signed] De rerum usu et abusu Furmer, Bernard [Very Good] [Hardcover]

First edition. Antwerp: Ex officina Christophori Plantini, 1575. Quarto (8 1/16"" x 5 13/16"", 205mm x 148mm). [Full collation available.] With an engraved vignette to the title-page and 25 engraved plates in-line with the text. Bound in XIXc mottled calf by Lloyd (signed at the upper edge of the verso of the front free end-paper) with a triple fillet border and corner-rosettes all gilt. On the spine, five raised bands. Author and title gilt to red morocco in the second panel, imprint gilt to red morocco in the third. Double gilt fillet to the edges of the boards. Gilt inside dentelle. Marbled end-papers. All edges of the text-block gilt. Extremities rubbed, with some scuffing to the boards. Loss to the head-piece, with the front board starting at the top. Lacking the final blank. Repaired tear to the title-leaf and to A4, with some smaller repaired marginal splits. The text-block likely washed and pressed. Altogether clean and square. Bookplates of ""the Shakespearian Library of Marsden J. Perry"" and of Bibliotheque I.G. Schorsch to the front paste-down. Bernard Furmer (Furmerius, 1542-1616) was a Frisian (i.e., from the region of modern northwestern Germany and northern Netherlands) humanist and chronicler, best known for his work on the history of his ethnic group. He sought to provide a biblical origin (sons of Noah) for the Frisians, and his facility with biblical sources underpins the present work. It is an emblem-book: a collection of illustrations -- after Cherubino Alberti, Guido Reni et al. -- here paired with quotations from the Bible. Furmer's verses praise charity and malign the greedy; a translation, more or less, into Dutch by Dirck Volckertszoon Coornhert as Recht ghebruyck ende misbruyck van tydlycke have in 1585 was very popular. In itself it is a fine product from the Plantin press, one of the leading humanist publishers of the Northern Renaissance, but its importance in European letters is enhanced by its connection to Shakespeare. In the XVIIIc, the German search for the sources of the later Classical compendia -- Quellenforschung -- turned to other disciplines. Shakespeare's plays, richly allusive to the Bible and to Classical literature, though seldom simply, became a target for English scholars. Francis Douce (1757-1834) was Keeper of Manuscripts at the British Museum (which then contained what is now the British Library), and made the connection between emblem books such as the present item, with their brief quotations and often fanciful illustrations, and the Bard. Henry Green (Shakespeare and the emblem writers, London: Trübner and Co., 1870; pp. 488-489) connects, for example, ""Paupertas immerita"" (undue poverty, B2r), illustrated by a pauper being handed a sack of gold by the divine hand from a cloud and a rich man handed an empty bowl, with a speech of Caliban's in the Tempest: ""And then in dreaming,/ The clouds methought would open and show riches/ Ready to drop upon me; that when I waked,/ I cried to dream again"" (III.2) He also sees the illustration in a speech of Gloucester's in King Lear: ""Here, take this purse, thou whom the heavens' plagues/ Have humbled to all strokes: that I am wretched/ Makes thee the happier. Heavens, deal so still! . ./ So distribution should undo excess,/ And each man have enough."" (?V.1) These connections make the book crucially important to scholars and collectors of Shakespeare, such as Marsden Jasael Perry (Jasiel, Jaseal; 1850-1935). Perry acquired the Shakespeare collection of J.O. Halliwell-Philipps, which Henry Clay Folger would go on to buy (after the 1907 financial crisis) for the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. The volume somehow entered the collection of Irvin G. Schorsch Jr. (1927-2014) and his wife Anita, whose collection of emblem books were offered at Sotheby's New York 14 June 2016 (after a $10M sale of their other material in January), where the present lot was lot 169. Brunet II, 1426-1427; Landwehr, 168.