Wing C425a; Duveen 115; Bonacini 315. Second edition (first printed Venice 1619). This is the only substantial early treatment of inks and their manufacture, including inks of various colours. Clair’s Chronology of Printing mentions nothing on ink earlier than 1832: perhaps because Canepari’s section on writing and printing inks, though valuable, is just 44 pages in a work of much wider scientific and historical interest. Thorndike found it “difficult... to classify the work under mineralogy, alchemy, technology, or natural magic” (VII, 250-52) - to which list we might add advice on health, and pharmacy.
François Auguste was the eldest son of the important collector Jacques-Auguste De Thou. Neither was in fact alive when this book was printed, the son having been beheaded by order of Richelieu in 1642 for concealing his knowledge of the Cinq-Mars conspiracy. I suppose the family sometimes added his arms, as they did his father’s, posthumously to books in the library, at some time before its sale in 1680