[Nueremberg], 1642. Folio (34.3 x 22.5 cm). Engraved title page; large, folded index leaf; 34 engraved plates. Contemporary mottled calf. Spine with four raised bands.

Very rare first edition - with the nearly always lacking 1663 index - of natural history objects and antiques in the Wunderkammer of the brothers Basil (1561-1629) and Hieronymus (1566-1632) Besler. This "proto-museum" was inherited and enriched by Basil's nephew, the Neuremberg physician and pharmacist Michael Rupert Besler (1607-1661). This 'treasury of natural things from the vegetable, animal, and mineral kingdoms' contains birds, shells (some delicately carved), corals, minerals, and typical Wunderkammer artefacts such as a unicorn horn, several 'Arcimboldo' grotesque of shells, antique coins and pretty polished marble slabs, along with such unica as the sword of the Bohemian knight Johann Zisca (c.1378-1424; leader of the Hussites). Many rare plants and birds are figured, along with ethnographic objects such as a Brazilian Indian girdle made from the nuts of the Brazilian tree Cerbera ahovai. The image of this plate was used for the border of Valentini's Museum museorum (Frankfurt 1714) (see, e.g., Fearrington, p. 26). Besler was a in Nuremberg, was a virtuoso scholar-collector, and also assembled an important collection of art and antiquities. These plates were reissued in 1716, and 1733. In this first edition there is no further text, other than the (sometimes extensive) plate captions, and the index. This copy is before numbers. “Some worm traces on the pastedown margins, spine professionally repaired, otherwise fine. Cobres p. 102, n 10; Fearrington, Rooms of Wonder, 10; Nissen ZBI, 346.