An excellent, complete set of the famous chronicle of the century, illustrated by Matthaeus Merian and his successors, hailed as the first and most comprehensive source for the age of Louis XIV and the Thirty Years War. Due to the long publication period of almost 100 years, complete 21-volume sets are very rare.
"One of the greatest printing enterprises of the 17th century [...] The numerous maps, views, portraits, and illustrations of historical events and battles lend the work an historical and cultural value that will endure" (LGB). "Based on our own experience we should wish to say that the German language possesses no other comparable or similarly ample repository of contemporary historical documentation on the age of the Thirty Years War and the Age of Louis XIV" (Wüthrich).
Individual volumes saw as many as six printings; the present copy is composed of volumes from the first three or four impressions. The number and arrangement of the engravings varies from printing to printing; Wüthrich states a maximum inventory of 693 different plates with 722 illustrations. As even Wüthrich was not able to include all variant printings, our own collation is based on the list of plates bound with the set, which appears to provide a fairly accurate account of the omission or substitution of individual plates in the course of printing. At first the portraits are inserted into the text, from vol. 9 onwards they are on interleaves throughout. Matthaeus Merian the Elder himself engraved some 140 of the plates present here, "among them the finest and most valuable of his entire oeuvre [...] The final volumes contain several truly magnificent specimens of portrait printing" (Wüthrich).
Uniform copies in such appealing bindings as these are extremely rare, especially when complete: a markedly incomplete copy in unsophisticated vellum ("sold with all faults, not subject to return") commanded £30,500 at Sothebys in November 2007.
Bindings rubbed and chafed, some spine-ends chipped, occasional worming. Seven of the early volumes are a little smaller than the others, but have been brought to uniform size through the bindings. Wants the engraved title-page of vol. 16; none published for vol. 20. The 40 missing plates belong mostly to vols. 2-5, comprising numerous views of sieges of large German cities (as well as Lisbon in vol. 16, and 2 maps). Text somewhat browned throughout with some brownstaining; a few tears to the folds. Volume 2 (the earliest in the set) more markedly browned and stained; numerous edge tears to text (also in vols. 4-6); roughly a third of pp. 409f. has been remargined with loss. In a few volumes the index leaves and a few plates show edge tears; occasional slight worming; some plates in vol. 21 are stamped on the verso. From the library of the landgraves of Hesse-Kassel with their gilt-stamped crown to the spines; transferred to the Marburg University library after 1717. Later in the Princely Fürstenberg Court Library with their stamps. LGB² VII, 399f; Wüthrich III, 113-272 (supersedes the earlier accounts in Lipperheide, Bingel, Fauser, and Diesch).