?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 800 - $ 1,200
Armenian Manuscript, 17th Century.
Duodecimo-format manuscript on laid paper in an upright script, written in black and red ink throughout, nineteen lines per page, 206 leaves; with red initials and chapter headings; additionally embellished with more than a dozen decorative chapter headings that include larger initials (sometimes incorporating images of fish), and large ornaments in the side margins, all accomplished in a burgundy liquid ink, the shapes mostly geometric, floral, or leaf-motif, many with knotwork details; text written within vertical red rules: double on the fore-edge and single on the gutter margins; consisting of eighteen signatures in twelves, each signed with an initial letter on the first and last leaves; lacking leaves in the first signature, as only two are present, likely of twelve; other quires are all in twelve's, without signs of any leaves missing; final leaf is integral and blank; some minute contemporary annotations; bound in full contemporary blind-tooled dark brown morocco over wooden boards in the Armenian style, with V-shaped notches at the sewing stations, boards cut flush to the page size, chevron plaited endbands in red and white worked onto the board edges; lacking clasps and the leather flap that once covered the pages at the fore-edge, with remnants present inside the back board; deep blue fabric pastedowns present; numerous narrow blind lines scored vertically along spine; some joint cracking, but structurally intact and unsophisticated; the front board decorated with a complicated intertwining knotwork design within a circle with serpentine borders above and below all carefully picked out with minute hand-tooled individual dots; the back board with a similar four-sided border panel and four blind tools in the inner compartment; 4 1/8 x 3 in.
