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Fourteen copies of this incunable survive, although not all with the
woodcut frontispiece depicting Marco Polo as a Renaissance gentleman, posing
before a cloth of honor. The German of the text was produced by an anonymous
translator who worked from a Tuscan copy: whenever he encountered a word he
didn't recognize, he left it in that Italian dialect. As with many incunables,
the printed text stands independently of the surviving manuscripts (two, in this
case); presumably its exemplar was jettisoned once the printer, Creussner had
finished using it for setting the type.
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