Oldest Book on Chocolate to Auction

Un Discurso del Chocolate, written by Santiago Valverde Turices and printed 400 years ago in Seville, is considered to be the first book to focus exclusively on chocolate. It is being offered in an online auction ending April 13 by ANNO, Leilões de livros antigos e raros, an auction house exclusively dedicated to rare books located in Guimarães, Portugal.

Only three copies of the book printed in 1624 are known to have survived. It features some of the oldest known chocolate recipes and explores the nature of chocolate, then regarded mainly as a drug or medication. 

The subject of chocolate and its properties had been dealt with before, but only in publications with a broader scope or together with news of other novelties arriving in Europe at the time. It is believed that there was an earlier publication entirely dedicated to chocolate printed in Mexico in 1609 but no copy has survived to prove its existence.

Un Discurso del Chocolate, which was widely publicised in its time and influenced later publications, included information that Valverde Turices had gathered from the people who made chocolate in Seville and elsewhere in Spain about the qualities of cocoa, different ways of drinking chocolate, and the effect it had on healthy people as well as those with some kind of medical issue. The author provides useful clues about how chocolate was made and the ingredients used to prepare it, describing the properties of sugar, hazelnuts, aniseed, and chilli pepper.  

Santiago Valverde Turices was a doctor and academic in Seville and dedicates the work to Don Fernando Afan de Ribera i Enriquez, Duke of Alcalá, whose arms are reproduced on the book's title page. Despite the popularity of this work in the 17th century, today only two copies of this curious Discurso are known to exist in public libraries, at the University of California and the National Library of Madrid.

The 32-page book, which has an estimate of Euros 2,000-4,000, comes from the library of José Augusto Correia de Campos (1890 – 1977), a career soldier who became a writer and historian. Other highlights from the sale include:

• a rare Bible of Vatable printed in Salamanca in 1555 and expunged by the Spanish Inquisition, with only five copies known
• a set of Epistolae by Pope Pius II (Enea Silvio Piccolomini), printed in Lyon in 1497
• the Antiquitates Romanae by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, printed in Treviso in 1480