THE HYPNERATOMACHIA POLYPHILI, along with other "rare tomes," is becoming availble on CD-Rom/DVD according to the Berkeley Daily Planet:

These discs make it possible to examine and magnify in minute detail not just text and illustrations, but even the paper, watermarks and binding. Although for now we still see through a glass, it is no longer darkly. It is as if someone, our computer genie, were willing to take an infinite amount of time to display every detail of a treasured object, its hand-tooled leather bindings, translucent watercolors, the very texture of the paper. There is none of that greying out of the page that you find in many facsimiles. The presence of each book is almost palpable.

The Octavo Editions series covers classics in art, architecture, botany, zoology, religion, science and literature and, although the actual book is viewable in its pristine form, plenty of explanatory background material is provided as well. While the prospect of owning Gutenberg’s Bible, Redouté’s Roses or Tory’s Champ Fleury rang my bells, the following titles made this old English major positively salivate:

The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), the chef d’oeuvre of Aldus Manutius, the greatest printer of the Italian Renaissance, has fascinated poets, psychologists and iconographers for half a millennium. Anyone interested in dreams, erotica, alchemy, architecture, hieroglyphs, emblems, allegory or symbolism has probably stumbled upon this title and its hermetic illustrations and wondered about its author, its euphuistic language and its meaning.

It reads like a collaboration between Baron Corvo and Carl Jung. The real author is unknown even though the name Francesco Colonna is encrypted into the text. Joscelyn Godwin, whose 1999 translation is the only complete English version, pays lip service to Colonna in that volume, although two years earlier in Prague he told me that he was convinced by recent scholarship that Leone Battista Alberti, the humanist author and architect, wrote this strife of love in a dream. Whoever wrote it, the book is one of the most beautiful ever printed and all of that loveliness comes through in this disc.