What I have now got

Here is my-newly acquired book, held open by me at the start of the text. To see the title page, click on What should I bid? on the right.

It is bound nicely in half leather,[1], in a binding which I guess was done a century ago.

It is tiny: its pages measure 14.2 cm by 9.2 cm, which is under two thirds of the page area of the earliest Penguins[2] or just over half that of my Feltrinelli paperback of “Il Gattopardo”.

It does not make up for its small size of page by having many of them, as can be judged from the picture of the spine of the book, photographed against the backdrop of Hokusai's Wave on the desktop of my iMac. It is an imperfect edition, in that it has 54 folios, making 108 pages, with (according to the Bonhams auction details) seven folios missing.

The section headings (e.g. the fifteen word after LIBRO PRIMO) are in a roman font in a size approximately equal to 11½ point today, and the body text in italic in 9 on 11½ point. Italic had been first used by Venetian printers early in the sixteenth century in small octavo[3] books because the slanted type took up less horizontal space than an upright roman one, and so such books needed less paper and could be sold more cheaply.

Let's have a closer look at what the book says.

INCOMINCIA	[HERE] BEGINS
IL LIBRO CHIAMATO	THE BOOK CALLED
EPULARIO.	[THE] BANQUET.
Il quale insegna il modo di cucinare ogni carne, e pesce, & ogn altra ragione di vivande.	The which teaches the way of cooking all meat, and fish, & all other reasons of provisions [this phrase needs consideration].
LIBRO PRIMO.	BOOK ONE.
Per dare ad intendere qual carne si debba fare arosto, & quale alesso[4].	To make understood what meat ought to be roasted and what boiled.

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[1] A half leather binding has the spine and the two corners of the covers bound in leather, and the rest covered in cloth.
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[2] “Penguin revolutionised publishing in the 1930s through its high quality, inexpensive paperbacks, sold through Woolworths and other high street stores for sixpence [2.5 new pence, in 1935 worth £3.92 in 2010 when adjusted for changes in average earnings (measuringworth.com)]”. (Wikipedia)
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[3] "An octavo is a book or pamphlet made up of one or more full sheets of paper on which 16 pages of text were printed, which were then folded three times to produce eight leaves. Each leaf of an octavo book thus represents one eighth the size of the original sheet." (Wikipedia)
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[4] This word alesso is not in my 2,277 page Collins Sansoni dictionary. Here it is in the second edition of John Florio's "World of Words", accessible through Google Books[>].

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