Quintus Curtius. [De rebus Alexandri Regis Macedonum libri III-X.]Venice, heirs of Aldo I Manuzio & Andrea I Torresano, July 1520. 8vo. With Aldo’s woodcut anchor and dolphin device on the title-page, repeated on the verso of the otherwise blank last leaf (each with letterpress “AL ... DUS” flanking the device). Set in Aldo’s famous italic (with upright capitals), the world’s first italic printing type, first used in 1501. Richly blind-tooled brown goatskin morocco (early 20th-century with the older bookplate moved to the new paste-down?).

[8], 170, [2] ll.First and only Aldine edition, in the original Latin, of all eight surviving books of Quintus Curtius Rufus's history of Alexander the Great, here with the title-page in its first setting, omitting the “r” in “Curtius”, which has been corrected by stamping an R between the U and T. We know almost nothing about Quintus Curtius Rufus with certainty. Literary parallels and linguistic and stylistic evidence suggest he lived in the Roman Empire in the 1st century CE. Curtius Rufus is particularly known for the present work, the only extant extensive Latin account of Alexander the Great written during Roman antiquity and a major source of information about him for Rufus’s contemporaries, but also for scholars in the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance.The present Aldine edition is rarely offered for sale, confirming Renouard's description of the volume as "rare".With a 17th-century owner's inscription in brown ink on the title-page (“ex libris Dom: de Thomasus”) with some marginal annotations throughout in the same hand. With the bookplate on the front paste-down of the French physician Henri Guéneau de Mussy (1814-1892), whose family often held positions as court physicians to the family of the Duc d’Orléans,. Henri Guéneau de Mussy was the court physician of Louis Philippe I (1773-1850), King of France from 1830 to his 1848 exile, and was also to gain a high reputation in London after Louis Philippe I died. With some small spots and minor stains throughout, but overall in very good condition, the binding fine.l Adams C3120; BM STC Italian, p. 207; Ahmanson-Murphy 164; EDIT16 13880; Renouard 88:1; USTC 825121.