An Anonymous Volume of Sixteenth-Century Poems

A printed volume of sixteenth-century Italian poems in the British Museum is probably the most puzzling and difficult book I have ever tried to catalogue. For not only has it no author's name, place of printing or date, but it has no kind of title whatever. The Museum acquired the volume in 1838, and for want of a better heading entered it under ‘Sonnets.’ Since the book contains not only sonnets but also canzoni, and since ‘Sonnets’ is not the heading under which one would find it in any catalogue outside Britain, this is a bad heading, but I am still at a loss to know where better the British Museum catalogue might enter it. I have not known where to look for it in Italian libraries, nor have the librarians whom I have interrogated in Milan, Florence, Rome and elsewhere succeeded in producing a copy or in recognizing the device which appears twice in the book (see reproduction accompanying this article); yet it is hardly likely that no copy exists in at least one of the great Italian libraries. The copy in the British Museum (press-mark 1073. h. 2) remains the only one known to me

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