Aa. Vv. - Delle Sette Trombe - 1838

new edition of the famous devotional and eschatological treatise Delle Sette Trombe. A very useful work for calling sinners to penance, printed in Naples in 1858 at the expense of the typographer and bookseller Gennaro Apicella, active on the historic Strada San Biagio dei Librai at number 100. It is a classic pocket-sized booklet for consumption and spiritual edification of southern Italy, printed in a characteristic pocket format and designed to shake consciences through the strong dramatic impact of its text and its images.

The specimen is preserved in its genuine contemporaneous binding in mute light ochre colored flexible cardboard, a typically poor publishing wrapper intended for everyday use that today makes this state of preservation particularly rare. The text block, printed on cloth-made paper typical of nineteenth-century Naples, shows the natural signs of time such as slight foxing and marginal edge wear, which however do not affect the solidity of the binding nor the perfect legibility of the type.

The true collectible value of this booklet lies in its richly dense popular illustration program, consisting of a vignette on the title page and no fewer than seven large full-page wood engravings that mark the different moments of the preaching. These wood engravings present a deliberately archaic, linear and highly expressive stroke, echoing the traditional iconography of the Novissimi. Three plates reproduce the same structure with Christ the Judge in glory among the clouds and the resurrection of the flesh, while the remaining ones depict with stark realism the separation of the righteous from the reprobates with a demon armed with a pitchfork, the dramatic chamber of the dying man contested between the guardian angel and the devil, the apocalyptic hydra with seven heads rising from the waters, and the terrifying punishment of the damned among the flames of hell.

Since this popular literature was read until total wear, surviving booklets are almost always disordered or mutilated; finding a complete, intact, and clean specimen represents a significant exception for the antiquarian book market and for the popular wood engraving.]