AN EARLY PRINTED WORK OF HERMES TRISMEGISTUS 1503.

HERMES TRISMEGISTUS. Aureum planeque divinum opusculum Mercurii Trismegisti de potestate ac sapiencia dei, interprete Marsilio Ficino Florentino.
Maguntina (Mainz), Johannes Schoeffer, 1503.
8:o (about 190x136 mm., binding195x140 mm.). (50, last blank) ll. With Schoeffer's woodcut device on last but one leaf verso.
20th century half vellum, blank spine. Some worming, a few brownspots, some contemporary marginal annotations and underlinings to text.

Johannes Schoeffers (Schöffers) first printed book.

Hermes Trismegistus (from Ancient Greek: Ἑρμῆς ὁ Τρισμέγιστος, "Hermes the Thrice-Greatest") is a legendary Hellenistic period figure that originated as a syncretic combination of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth.#1 He is the purported author of the Hermetica, a widely diverse series of ancient and medieval pseudepigraphica that laid the basis of various philosophical systems known as Hermeticism.
The wisdom attributed to this figure in antiquity combined a knowledge of both the material and the spiritual world, which rendered the writings attributed to him of great relevance to those who were interested in the interrelationship between the material and the divine.
The figure of Hermes Trismegistus can also be found in both Muslim and Baháʼí writings. In those traditions, Hermes Trismegistus has been associated with the prophet Idris (the Biblical Enoch). (Wikipedia).

Provenance: Sven Borgström was born in Malmö in 1927 and worked as a chemist in Stockholm, Malmö and Lund. His fine library which was built up over many years, consists mainly of older books dated from the 15th century to the late 18th century.
His book-collecting began, as it perhaps should, with an incunabula. Borgström's interests included printers, book bindings, book illustrations, and he was interested in history, travel and maps. As a result of previous coin collecting, the subject of numismatics was also of interest in his library. Sven Borgström died 95 years old.

See text.