De Civitate Dei

Saint Augustine, Bishop of Hippo. De civitate Dei (with Commentaries by Nicolaus Trevet and Thomas Waleys). Mainz, Germany: Peter Schoeffer, 5 September 1473. 38 cm.

This edition is from the presses of Johannes Fust and Peter Schoeffer, Gutenberg's successors in Mainz. Peter Schoeffer continued to print in Mainz, producing many high quality works including this edition of De civitate Dei. The typefaces are the same used to print his 1462 Bible and the Commentary appearing in the 1459 Duramus.

The opening to each book is extensively rebricated in red and blue, while book numbers and illuminated capitals appear on each page. An unsigned nineteenth-century note on the final leaf attributes the rubrication to Lazarus von Andlau, its author stating that he has seen a book with similar rubrication in the shop of a German bookseller signed by Lazarus.

This second edition contains the commentary by the Oxford Dominicans Nicolaus Trevet (fl. 1297-1334) and Thomas Waleys (d. 1349) printed separately from the main text.

This copy of De civitate Dei was given to the Whitefish Bay Public Library (WBPL) in 1956 by Mrs. Sidney C. Fraser in memory of her husband, a collector of rare books and a WBPL Board member. It was on loan to the Golda Meir Library through 1999 to provide an optimal environment for preservation and to ensure secure access to the volume by students and scholars. It was acquired by Marquette University, Milwaukee, in March 1999 through the generosity of Frank and Rose Mary Matusinec, and was added to the university's library as its symbolic Millionth Volume.