Stephen Sinon is the William B. O’Connor Curator of Special Collections, Research and Archives

Raymund Minderer (1570-1621) served the city of Augsburg, Germany as city physician. He wrote upon subjects as varied as pharmacology, military field surgery and the plague. Appointed by the city council, he was responsible for the health of the city’s population and urban sanitation. He supervised the city’s pharmacies, midwives and barbers as well as serving as the town coroner.

The Mertz Library owns a copy of Minderer’s Aloedarium Marcocostinum printed in Augsburg in 1616. In it he extolled the virtues and preparation of aloe, myrrh, crocus, thyme and rhubarb as laxatives and general tonics. The Mertz Library’s copy has an attractive binding with decorative lozenges stamped onto the front and back cover. The real surprise comes when you remove the book from its protective clamshell box.

The edges of the text block are gilded and gauffered on all three sides. Gauffering is a technique of stamping a decorative pattern along the edges of a book’s text block. The practice began in the early 1500s. Up until that time books were often stacked on shelves with their edges facing outward and by marking the edges with a design they could be easily identified. Within a century, book collections grew in size and required a new system of shelving. The method we use today of standing books on their end with the spine facing outwards allowed binders to decorate and label their spines to assist with identification.

The earliest examples of gilded book edges began to appear in the late 1400s. While it is quite striking in appearance the purpose of the gilded edge was to prevent dust from penetrating through a book and to make it much easier to clean. The Mertz Library collections do have many examples of this practice but it appears that Minderer’s book is the only one which is also gauffered. Due to the added expense of labor and materials, gauffering was not a common practice and eventually died out in the mid-1600s.