Last month we received a 1638 first edition of Margherita Costa's Guitar (La Chittara), a collection of love poems, featuring gilt-stamped border and fillets and marbled end papers. Margherita Costa was one of the most prolific female authors and performing artists of seventeenth-century Europe, including during a period marked by a decline in secular women's writing in Italy. This work includes a fine portrait etching of the author by Stefano della Bella (1610-1664).
