Firmicus Maternus (Julius) and others. [Scriptores Astronomici veteres], [edited by Franciscus Niger], 2 parts in 1, text in Latin and Greek, 376 ff., including blanks E7 and K10, 37-40 lines for Latin text and 39-40 lines for Greek text, Roman and Greek types, initial spaces with guide-letter, woodcut diagrams and illustrations, first and last ff. from another copy, occasional mostly marginal foxing or finger-marking, handsome dark blue straight-grain morocco, richly gilt, by Bozérian le jeune, covers with wide scrolling borders of floral and foliage tools with ?sun corner-pieces, all within double filet borders, spines in compartments and decorated with foliage tools 'à mille points', corners little worn, rubbed at extremities, g.e., [BMC V, 560; Goff F-191; HC 14559; Ahmanson-Murphy 34; Renouard, Alde, 20:3], folio, [ Venice], [Aldus Manutius], [October, 1499].

⁂ The first edition of Aldus's monumental compilation of astrological and astronomical texts with superb woodcuts, including four by the 'Poliphilo Master'. It is one of the few works by Aldus to include illustrations. The work includes the first edition in the original Greek of Aratus's Phaenomena, as well as Maternus's de Nativitatibus libri viii and Marcus Manilius's Astronomicon. The final section contains the editio princeps of pseudo-Proclan's Sphaera, with excerpta from the Elementa astronomiae of Geminos of Rhodes, translated by the Oxford humanist Thomas Linacre.