MIKHAIL SLEZKA (MYKHAILO SLOZKA) (?-1667) Triod’, siest’ Tripesnets svyatoy Velikoy Chetyredesyatnitsy [The Triodion, That Is: The Book of Three Odes for Holy Great Lent]. Lviv: at the printing house of Mikhail Slezka, at the expense of Bishop Afanasy Zheliborsky, 1664.

2-6 nn., 1-453 fol.; 2°. Contemporary binding: boards covered in blind-stamped leather. The engravings in the text are executed in the characteristic manner of the Lviv school, distinguished by fine lines and attention to the details of garments and interiors. The volume is richly decorated with numerous headpieces with lavish floral and geometric ornament in the style of the late Renaissance and early Baroque, as well as initials. In good condition. Fragments of the leather binding restored, tears to leaves reinforced, rare losses repaired, soiling, water stains; rare losses of leaf fragments with minor damage to the text pasted over with paper (all restoration dating from the 18th-19th centuries), traces of wax. The first title page with the arms of the Zheliborsky family on the reverse is missing. Inserted notes and numerous ownership inscriptions in the margins, 17th-19th centuries. Mikhail Slezka was an outstanding West Ruthenian printer and publisher of the first half of the 17th century. A native of Vilnius, he arrived in Lviv as a young man ‘with nothing but a knapsack’ and from 1630 worked at the printing house of the Lviv Dormition Stauropegion Brotherhood; in 1633 he became a member and soon headed its printing house. He was a talented printer, writer (author of numerous dedications, prefaces and afterwords), bookbinder and bookseller. Weary of the control exercised by the Lviv Brotherhood, Slezka left the brotherhood’s press and founded his own in 1638. Mikhail Slezka produced around 20 publications, more than any of his contemporaries working in the region’s printing houses. This unique monument of 17th-century Slavonic Cyrillic printing is of high cultural, artistic, scholarly and material value and ranks among book monuments of national significance.