The online auction runs from 6 to 13 April and also includes a rare forbidden Bible printed in 1555.
The book, Un Discurso del Chocolate, was written by Santiago de Valverde Turices, a Spanish doctor and academic, and printed in Seville 400 years ago, in 1624.
The book contains advice, recipes and history and it is up for auction for €2,000 at Guimarães auction house Anno, which specializes in old and rare books.
Until now, only two copies of the work were known - one is at the National Library in Madrid and the other at the University of San Diego in California.Â
But this copy was discovered among a collection of rare antique books owned by Portuguese military officer, writer and archaeologist José Augusto Correia de Campos (1890-1977) that will now go on sale on April 6 at Anno auction house.
According to Francisco Brito, Anno's consultant - there is no mention of this treatise on chocolate in the catalogs of the main 20th century book auctions, which leads him to conclude that there are only three copies whose whereabouts are known today, including the volume that belonged to Correia de Campos.
The work will go on sale with an exit price of €2,000, and the auctioneer estimates that it could reach €4,000. However, the fact that there are no previous sales to serve as a reference makes the outcome of the bidding more difficult to predict.
Written in Castilian and dedicated to Don Fernando Afan de Ribera i Enriquez (1583-1637), 3rd Duke of Alcalá and Marquis of Tarifa, Valverde Turices' "speech" is not the first European reference to the exotic substance produced from cocoa beans, brought from the Americas (then called the Indies, or New World) by the first Spanish colonisers. But it is, as far as we know, the first book entirely focused on chocolate.
There are valuable books going under the hammer at the same auction. The most important of which is a very rare first Iberian edition of the "Vatable Bible", originally printed in Paris in 1545.
The rarity of copies of this edition is explained by the early persecution of Bibles and other religious texts with heretical propositions or other deviations by the Spanish Inquisition, as Menendez Pelayo explains in Historia de los Heterodoxos Españoles (1947). Aimed specifically at limiting the circulation of Bibles with errors or heresies, in 1554 the Censura generalis contra errores, quibus recentes haeretici Sacram Scripturam asperserunt, edita a supremo Senatu Inquisitionis adversos haereticorum pravitatem et apostasiam in Hispania (...) was published in Córdoba. The survival of some copies of this 1555 Biblia Sacra... may be due precisely to the small gap between the publication of the Censura of Córdoba (1554) and the Index published five years later in Valladolid, which was already aimed at this 1555 edition of the Biblia Sacra...
Only two copies of Un Discurso del Chocolate, published 400 years ago, were known to exist. The online auction runs from 6 to 13 April and also includes a rare forbidden Bible printed in 1555.
According to Francisco Brito, Anno's consultant - and owner of the Cólofon bookshop in Guimarães - there is no mention of this treatise on chocolate in the catalogues of the main 20th century book auctions, which leads him to conclude that there are only three copies whose whereabouts are known today, including the volume that belonged to Correia de Campos.
The Jesuit historian and cosmographer José de Acosta mentions chocolate in his Natural and Moral History of the Indies, published in 1590, the physician Juan de Cárdenas discusses it in his Marvellous Problems and Secrets of the Indies, in 1593, and to name just one of many examples, Bartolomé Marradón, another physician, who visited the then Viceroyalty of New Spain, with its capital in Mexico City, at the end of the 16th century, printed a Dialogue on the Use of Tobacco in 1618, in which he discusses not only the habit of smoking, but also the beneficial and harmful effects of chocolate that "time and experience" had enabled him to discover.
What distinguishes Valverde Turices' study - a mixture of scientific treatise, practical guide, recipe and chronicle of customs - is the fact that it is, as far as we know, the first book to focus entirely on chocolate. In fact, the author considered the subject to be so vast and complex that he thought it preferable, as he explains in the introduction, "to divide the discourse into five parts, dealing in each one with what will be seen".
Un Discurso del Chocolate is the first lot in the catalogue, but all the works in the auction will be available from 6 April on the Anno website, where interested parties can bid on them until the 13th.
One of the most curious aspects of the Sevillian doctor's book is the set of recipes he presents, collected from those who knew how to prepare chocolate, both in Spain and in the New World. In the civilisations of Central America, it was only consumed by the ruling class and was a hot and bitter drink, not to the taste of the European colonisers, who began to add a series of spices and other products to sweeten and spice it up.
"Six pounds of cocoa, one pound of aniseed, half a pound of cinnamon, five pounds of sugar, two ounces of black pepper, half an ounce of cloves, four [hot] caribbean peppers," recommends one of the recipes proposed by Valverde Turices.
And the author, who also attaches great importance to the therapeutic properties of chocolate for different types of humours, adds that for choleric and sanguine people, up to four ounces of annatto can be added to the above recipe, a fruit that the Spanish call achiote and which is used in Brazil to produce paprika.
What is unknown, and it's a shame, is how this unusual work ended up in the hands of Correia de Campos. Born in Vila Nova de Paiva, in the district of Viseu, he descended on his paternal side from the Morgados de Alvellos, an important aristocratic family in the Viseu region, and "it is possible that some of the works in his collection came to him through inheritance or through the contacts he certainly had with the old families of the region", suggests Francisco Brito, adding that the historian and archaeologist "will also have bought some of the old books in his library at auctions and bookshops".
A forbidden Bible
The same questions remain unanswered when we move on to the third lot in this auction, a very rare first publication in the Iberian Peninsula of the so-called Vatable Bible, printed in Salamanca in 1555 on the presses of Andreas de Protonariis, ten years after the Paris edition of 1545. What makes the surviving copies of this edition so scarce is the fact that it was banned by the Spanish Inquisition, which had it burnt.
Once again, we don't know where Augusto Correia de Campos acquired it, but the fact that the title page bears several ownership signatures that correspond to Portuguese names, and which seem to date from the 16th or 17th centuries, leads us to believe that the volume crossed the border at that time. Francisco Brito even ventures to speculate that the Bible may have been brought into the country by a Portuguese student attending the University of Salamanca.