Leven en daeden van den H. Joannes den Dooper, met korte Zedelessen.

Engraved title, 120 pp., plus 21 plates. Bound in contemporary marbled wrappers, entirely untrimmed. Front cover nearly detached, some wear to spine, wrappers rubbed. Internally very well preserved.

Extremely rare work unusual for its re-use of copperplates originally engraved more than 200 years earlier. The 21 engravings here first appeared in 1590 in an (equally rare) Antwerp suite on the Life of John the Baptist (Vita B. Ioannis Baptistae graphice descripta) designed by the Antwerp artists Maarten de Vos and engraved by Jan Collaert, key figures in the production of Jesuit visual culture for devotional purposes. The present publication, printed in a tiny village in the province of Limburg in 1801, clearly represents a re-discovery of the copperplates which were printed at least twice in the late 16^th and early 17^th centuries in Antwerp (2 states are recorded by Hollstein). We have located two copies of this 1801 publication in Holland, although the re-use of these plates is unrecorded by Hollstein.

The reprinting of plates or plate books by publishing dynasties (of which perhaps the most famous is that of the de Rossi’s in Rome) is not uncommon, but it generally occurs within a short time after the appearance of the original publication. When original copperplates are reprinted at a further chronological remove, it is more commonly in an institutional context (i.e., at the Calcografia Romana). Rarer are re-discoveries of the present kind, in which two centuries elapse before plates are reprinted by a provincial publisher. These restrikes in places show that the copperplates received some minor wear over the years, but most engravings here are indistinguishable from the original printings.

Joannes Bernardus Smits seems to have been the first printer to set up in the provincial town of St. Truyden, some 50 miles southeast of Antwerp. He was active from the late 18^th century onwards, publishing mainly theological material.

The accompanying text was composed by P. Vanhoren, ex-teacher at the Godtsgeleerdheyd, who signs the preface to the reader. Like its 17^th-century forerunners, each finely engraved illustration of the life of John the Baptist is allocated its own set of ‘zedelessen’ or moral lessons which the reader is supposed to contemplate while viewing the picture as well as the narrative.

OCLC locates just 2 copies worldwide of this 1801 edition (Nimjegen, Tilburg), and just 3 US copies of the original suite (University of Connecticut, Georgetown, and Emory).