Herbert Hoover, Agricola, 1912 ed.

Description

Prior to being elected President Herbert Hoover was an engineer who specialized in mining. He took real pride in his profession and had acute interest in its history and antecedents.

He was fascinated by Georgius Agricola’s 1556 folio De Re Metallica. He called it “the first important attempt to assemble systematically in print the world-knowledge on mining, metallurgy, and industrial chemistry. It was the textbook of those industries for two centuries and had dominated thought and practice all that time.” 

Several people tried, but no one had ever succeeded in translating it into English. The problem of the untranslatable Agricola fascinated both the President and First Lady Lou Henry Hoover. LHH was and excellent Latinist and in fact taught Latin, she also was a polyglot, fluent in Mandarin. Many say she was the primary translator for this volume. Between the two of them they had to combined knowledge of language and the mining trade to take on the task.

There were formidable difficulties. Agricola’s Latin was excellent, but he was dealing with subject, nomenclature, and practices that had developed hundreds of years after the death of Latin.  Agricola did not use the German, Italian or English terms for the operations or substances he described. Instead, he coined or adapted Latin terms for them. The task was more scientific detective work than translation. Sometimes, after learning what a word meant they would learn there was no modern word to express it because that process had been long abandoned. The two scholars grappled with the text–mostly on Sundays–sentence by sentence, month after month, for over five years.

The production of the book itself was equally painstaking. After an exhaustive search, the Hoovers found a papermaker who could produce a sixteenth-century linen paper. The papermaker also found a typeface that was mostly an exact reproduction of the original. The only difference was the inclusion of the letter “F.” Much like “U” doing double duty as “V,” “F” and “S” were used interchangeably in the 1500s. This would be incredibly confusing to 20^th Century readers. The book is also printed as a folio volume.  It includes all the old prints and illustrations in astonishing fidelity to the original.  It is bound it in white vellum just like the original, too 

This edition is much more than an astute translation of Argricola’s original work.  Hoover states: “In addition to the translation, I wrote an introduction covering the times and circumstances under which Agricola lived and worked, with a brief biography of him.  We included full statements of all the known editions. I prepared extensive footnotes describing previous processes so far as knowledge of them is preserved–including those in Roman and Greek times. The footnotes also explained the processes and methods described by Agricola in relation to our modern practice.” 

Excellent condition; lt. surface soil only. 

[Hoover, Herbert Clark, translator (31st President)] C. Georgius Agricola.  DE RE METALLICA.  Translated from the First Latin Edition of 1556. With Biographical Introduction, Annotations and Appendices upon the Development of Mining Methods, Metallurgical Processes, Geology, Mineralogy & Mining Law from the earliest times to the