Viaggio da Venezia al Sancto Sepolcro al Monte Sinai piu copiosamente descritto de li altri con disegni de li Paesi . . Travel and Exploration

One of the earliest tour guides, written for pilgrims who were in the early modern era the closest equivalent to today's tourists. The guide touches on the city and sights beginning in Venice, and proceeds along the eastern Adriatic Coast in what is now Croatia, visits numerous places on the Aegean, before reaching its destination of Jerusalem. But in the Holy Land, the book explores places outside of it, including the Red Sea and Cairo, which would add a more distant leg to the traveler, but of course would be of interest for their Biblical significance. 15 by 11 cm. Unpaginated, 117 leaves. With many woodcuts, 128 by our count. Three double paged woodcut panoramas, eight full page, or nearly so (only three or four lines of text), woodcuts, including title page. 60 woodcuts of some size -- between half page or nearly so and three quarters of the page. And 65 pictorial woodcut vignettes, not including purely ornamental flourishes. Up to 30 lines of text per page. As the book was conceived as an aide for pilgrimages, there is an emphasis on stopping at significant churches, monasteries, and other religious points-of-interest along the way. And back then, there weren't museums and the like to draw the tourist, or perhaps, one could equate churches with museums, as much art, maybe the vast majority of art, was created for churches then. And monasteries served as hotels when there was no such concept. But the book isn't exclusively a religious Baedeker; it goes into many other things of interest. Our favorite topic and digression is a discussion of animals -- the elephant, the giraffe, the goat, the ostrich, all shown in not necessarily the most realistic woodcut illustrations. The binding has a paper pastedown that was made to look like tree calf, and does so convincingly. It has some rubbing and wear, with the spine looking as if it might have been squeezed hard. In the upper front corner of the board is a small label with a number, which might be a stock number for a store or a library notation. Whatever it is, it is probably 19th century, and we think it doesn't detract from the binding in the least. There are also two small labels mounted onto the spine, one with the title, one, given the date of 1518. We hedge this dating by adding 1519 because that conforms to the dates given on the last page of the book. These spine labels, while mounted with no thought to the aesthetic effect and might have looked like mounted band-aids at one time, now blend in with the binding and are inconspicuous, their chipping and soiling not a serious issue to us. The front endpapers have some pencil and ink scribbling and a rather ugly but small modern bookplate with writing in English and Hebrew. Throughout the book there are some light smudges, some light foxing, and other stains, but the leaves overall read as on the clean side. There is one short marginal closed tear, and certainly one could cite other less than desirable examples of wear and tear, but we think no one would take issue with our grading of this book as Very Good, if not slightly better than that.