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This is an early French translation of the first book on mining and metallurgy, which first appeared in Italian in 1540. It includes an historically significant section on early typecasting. The numerous woodcuts of the first edition, showing chemical and metallurgical apparatus and processes, are all present in this edition. The Pyrotechnia stands with Agricola's De Re Metallica and Ercker's Bescreibung allerfurnemisten mineralischen as one of the three most important 16th century books on mining and metallurgy. It revealed for the first time some of the trade secrets that were zealously guarded by the medieval trades guilds, which would have been a fairly risky thing for an author to do, but Biringuccio died a year before its publication.
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