The Earliest Printed Book on Wine

About the Book

Arnald of Villanova was one of the most colourful figures of the Middle Ages: a brilliant physician, prolific writer, adept in alchemy and astrology, lay theologian and reformer, adviser and ambassador to kings and popes. His treatise De vinis — on the preparation and medicinal use of wines — is among the earliest printed works on the subject, first appearing in the 1478 German edition of Wilhelm von Hirnkofen as Von Bewahrung und Bereitung der Weine.

In 1943, Henry E. Sigerist of the Johns Hopkins Institute of the History of Medicine produced the first English translation of this treatise, accompanied by a substantial historical essay on Arnald’s life and the manuscript tradition of the text. The edition was published by Schuman’s of New York in a limited run of 350 copies, designed and printed by the Press of A. Colish. It is a beautiful piece of bookmaking: printed in red and black with decorative initials, a frontispiece portrait, and a complete facsimile of the 1478 German original.

The text has been typeset to match the original design — fonts, spacing, layout, and colour. All decorative elements have been redrawn as vector graphics. The facsimile pages of the 1478 Hirnkofen edition are reproduced from high-resolution scans of an original copy. The result is not a scan or a photocopy but a complete digital reconstruction: the book as it was meant to be seen, at full resolution, free from the foxing and ageing of an eighty-year-old limited edition.