From Eco to Nabokov

Not the most earth-shattering collection, but I quite like this ensemble of first editions. (Apart from The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, which is an advanced reading copy that I begged a journalist friend to get for me. Wish I hadn't now since the illustrations in it are very blocky and in B&W. How anyone could have reviewed it properly is a mystery since the illustrations are a huge part of the joy of this book.)
I'm not sure what has happened to Baudolino; I've probably lent it to someone and taken their copy of The Golden Bough as collateral. One and a half detective fiction reference books have also managed to sneak their way into the picture.

Eco's books I'm sure will provide me with the sources of many posts, but this time it is the subject of the protagonist of the Flame's PhD that will serve -- the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. A book that in all likelihood I will never own, I did at least find a copy of the modern english translation for £3. The book is well known for the acrostic running through it which gives us the name of its author. As an aside, the idea of further codes hidden in the book was fictionalised as The Rule of Four.

When I first found out about the acrostic I wondered what the modern equivalent of it might be and Wikipedia came to the rescue. I tracked a copy of the first apperance of this down after much searching on abebooks and the other internet services -- hunting down first appearances of short stories like this is one of the more pleasurable aspects of my bibliomania (more on this in the next post with Raymond Chandler's first publication).
So there you have it, a rather tenuous link in my collecting habits, going from Eco to Nabokov via a truly weird and wonderul antiquarian book.

Incidentally my introduction to Eco was an airport paperback of The Name of the Rose, bought to keep me entertained on a part academic conference, part camping holiday in Estonia. I foolishly forgot my torch on this trip, and reading around the campfire one night, my paperback nearly went the way of that book's library!
As a bonus, since most of these pictures have been text heavy, here is my favourite illustration from the Hypnerotomachia (english ed.), the first appearance of what would become Aldus's famous device: