AGRICOLA, Georgius [Herbert Hoover and Lou Henry Hoover].
Georgius Agricola. De Re Metallica.
London: The Mining Magazine, 1912.
$15,000.00
In Stock
Item Number: RRB-152618
First English Edition of De Re Metallica, Translated by Herbert Hoover; Signed by President and First Lady Hoover and From the Library of Stanley M. Isaacs
First edition in English of the foundational treatise on mining and metallurgy, translated by Herbert Hoover and his wife Lou Henry Hoover, this copy signed by both. Folio, original full vellum gilt-lettered and stamped with the crossed-hammers mining device, dated 1556 and 1912 at the foot of the spine, top edge gilt, illustrated throughout with woodcuts after the sixteenth-century original. One of 3000 copies. Signed by Herbert Hoover and Lou Henry Hoover, with a contemporary note recording that they signed the volume by their own hand at request in 1929, the year Herbert Hoover entered the White House. From the collection of prominent New York Republican and later Manhattan Borough President Stanley M. Isaacs with his bookplate to the front pastedown. Stanley M. Isaacs (1882-1962) was a lifelong Manhattan lawyer and Republican politician, serving as the 13th Borough President of Manhattan from 1938 to 1941 before becoming a longtime member and eventually Minority Leader of the New York City Council from 1950 until his death in 1962. He was a Liberal Republican known for his advocacy of civil rights and housing for low income families, and his best known piece of legislation, the 1957 Sharkey-Brown-Isaacs Bill, barred racial discrimination in private housing. As Borough President, he worked with Parks Commissioner Robert Moses to complete the East River Drive, since renamed the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive. He remains the last Republican to have held the office of Manhattan Borough President. In near fine condition. Housed in a half morocco clamshell box. An exceptional example, most rare in this condition and signed by both President and First Lady Hoover.
De Re Metallica, first published in Latin in 1556, is the foundational treatise on mining, metallurgy, and geology, the work of the German scholar Georgius Agricola (1494-1555), often called the father of mineralogy. Comprehensively describing the mining and refining of metals and richly illustrated with woodcuts of the machinery and methods of the age, it remained the standard authority on the subject for nearly two centuries. This celebrated first English translation was made by Herbert Clark Hoover, a distinguished mining engineer who would become the thirty-first President of the United States, together with his wife Lou Henry Hoover, the first woman to take a degree in geology at Stanford. The couple devoted years to rendering Agricola’s difficult Renaissance Latin, much of which he had coined to describe techniques for which no classical words existed, and their scholarly edition, published by The Mining Magazine in London in 1912, was awarded the gold medal of the Mining and Metallurgical Society of America and has never been superseded. This copy was signed by both Hoovers in 1929, the year Herbert Hoover entered the White House.
Georgius Agricola. De Re Metallica.
$15,000.00
In Stock