Franciscus Heerman - Guldene Annotatien - 1657

FRANCISCUS HEERMAN, Golden Annotations by Franciscus Heerman: Displaying the most elegant Wits, Deeds, Sayings and Sentences, of the most noble and renowned men of the World, the twelfth edition. By the Author generally much augmented and improved. Amsterdam, Jan Frederiksz Stam, 1657. 12o: A-2F12 2G6, (14) 680 (16) p.
¶ In piously worn and tormented contemporary parchment with hollow spine, with writing spine-text in contemporary hand; front endpaper missing; binding worn; engraved frontispiece and typographic title lacking the upper right corner; the book block is worn and frayed due to intensive use. Here and there contemporary marginalia and underlinings. Whether this edition should also contain Heerman’s portrait I could not verify, but very likely not, because his head with marginalia-script appears on the frontispiece. Despite the external defects the book is nevertheless a decent copy. On the back endpaper a blind stamp of ‘Library of RMF van der Woude’. The work is dedicated to Stadtholder William II; after the ‘To the Reader’, there follow encomiastic poems by Jacob Cats and Caspar Barlaeus (Latin). The hundreds of anecdotes and proverbs are divided into 43 chapters. This was the most popular collection of quotes, maxims, aphorisms and anecdotes of the genre of so-called apophthegms in the Netherlands. This genre originates from the (neo-)classical rhetorical education, in which after Hippocrates and Plutarch, Erasmus was especially guiding, and in the vernacular Willem Baudartius. See J. Jansen, Brevitas (1995) I, p. 104-105. Since the first edition of 1634 there would have been about thirty reprints of Heerman’s Annotations, but that seems excessive. Excluding the title editions, the STCN records 20 editions. It notes that the title from 1685 (Amsterdam, G. de Groot) is the 17th edition, while the title page of another 1685 version (Amsterdam, J. ten Hoorn) claims the 28th edition. The 12th edition listed here is very likely in fact the ninth!
FRANCISCUS HEERMAN (c. 1610-c. 1670) was from Friesland, studied law in Wittenberg, and established himself as a lawyer in Amsterdam. STCN ID: 840751214.