Latin treatise on hay. With a moor’s head device of the bookseller Mohr. Rare.

[Latin] / [Agriculture] / Johannes Weitzius. Feriae Cereales. Tempore Messis Anno [1632] in Schola Gothana transactae. Schleusingen: Sumtibus Johannis Victorini Mohr / Bibliop. Jen. Excusae à Thoma Marckart, 1636. 8vo [15.4 x 9.3 cm], [1] f., 87 pp., [1] p., [3 ff.], with woodcut printer’s device on title page and woodcut initials. Bound in later marbled paper. Minor toning to wrapper edges. Toned (typical of German paper from this period), several contemporary annotations and red underlining.
 
 
Rare (1 U.S. copy: UC Davis) first edition of this learned Latin treatise on hay (and other grains), a work written to commemorate the 1632 harvest and delivered at the Schola Gothana (i.e., the renowned Ernestinum, or Ernestine Gymnasium, in Gotha) by Johann Weitz (1576-1642), the school’s rector.
 
The Feriae Cereales was published in Schleusingen by Thomas Marckart with the backing of the Jena bookseller Johann Viktor Mohr. Notable here is the device on the title page—a bust of a moor—which was meant as a visual pun on the surname ‘Mohr.’ Similar uses of Black figures are by no means unheard of in 17th-century printing, but I have not found this device used elsewhere in association with Johann Viktor Mohr.
 
Johann Weitz provides a thorough philological study (Latin, Greek, German, Hebrew, etc.) of hay (foenum), its harvest, its inhabiting fauna (cicadas, ants, biting insects), and even the Etesian winds which sweep across it during the dog days of summer.
 
This copy of the Feriae Cereales includes several contemporary annotations by a learned reader, who also neatly underlined several passages in red. 
 
The work is printed on rather poor paper, which is typical of German books published during the Thirty Years War (1618-48), and I am tempted to conjecture (based on zero evidence) that it contains particles of hay.
 
 
OCLC locates 1 U.S. copy of this title: UC Davis. A second edition (Altdorf: Johannes Goebelius) appeared in 1664 and is held at Columbia.
 
*VD17 23:278361G; Kaspar Sagittarius, Historia Gothana (1700), pp. 206-8 (on Weitz).