"Libro del juego de las suertes".

"Libro del juego de las suertes".
Anonymous.
Printer, Juan Joffre, Valencia, 1528.
Ricardo J. Vicent Valencia, 2006.
Limited edition.
Copy 160/3000.
Measurements: 30,5 x 22 x 2,5 cm.

The game consists of guessing the answers to a series of fundamental questions about life, and is intended to serve among a thousand other possibilities to fight against idleness. The reader is warned in the prologue that the answers are pure mockery or nonsense.

Nevertheless, the book was included in the first Spanish Index of Prohibited Books, in 1559. The work is anonymous but has been attributed to the Italian poet Lorenzo Spirito or Gualteri, this was properly his surname.

The first known edition of this work, with the title Libro della ventura, ovvero Libro delle sorti is from Vicenza, between 1480 and 1490, and continued to be published in Italian until the mid-sixteenth century. French editions also abound in the 16th century. In Spanish there was apparently an edition of 1502, in Milan, of which no copy is known, although Hernando Colón owned one; it was republished in 1515, in Valencia, in the workshop of Jorge Costilla, and currently only one copy is known, deposited with the legacy of Antonio Rodríguez Moñino and María Brey in the Library of the Royal Academy of History; the edition of 1528, which is included in our Collection; and finally another of 1535, also with only one known copy in the Austrian National Library, in Vienna.

This copy was also among the pieces exhibited at The New York Public Library in the aforementioned 1985 exhibition, "Tesoros de España: Ten Centurias of Spanish Books".