This volume presents the Latin original of an encomium of the Frankfurt trade fair, along with French, English, and German translations. The fair, held twice a year and one of the most important of the early modern period, included a bookfair that attracted scholars from all over Europe, who took the trouble of travel upon them in order to scout the latest publications from Europe's foremost printshops. The Encomium was written by one of this group of patrons: Henri II Estienne (1531–98), a Protestant French printer of prestigious descent in his profession, being the eldest son of Robert Estienne (1499–1559) and Iodocus Badius Ascensius's daughter Perette. His grandfather was Henri I Estienne (ca. 1470–1520). The author's lasting legacy is the Thesaurus Linguae Grecae, published in five folio volumes in 1572. It is the counterpart of his father's Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, and while it brought him lasting renown, it also put him into serious financial straits. It was this dire situation that prompted Estienne, among other things, to publish the Encomium in 1574, as Elsa Kammerer suggests in her introduction. With a dismal return on his investment in the costly volumes of the dictionary, which proved hard to shift, and the loss of the financial backing of the powerful Fugger family after ten years of support, Estienne was in dire need of new sources of income. He wittily chose to make light of the situation by literally presenting his press's offerings as market goods in the little volume that contained the Encomium, which he dedicated to the Frankfurt city councillors in an effort to win their favor.

The present edition was conceived upon the occasion of France being the guest of honor at the Frankfurt bookfair in 2017. It was not the first time Etienne's work has been used as a novelty book. Estienne's Encomium has a history of being presented as a celebratory edition on the occasion of the Frankfurt bookfair's various anniversaries. Given that Estienne's is a comparatively marginal text, and a trifle according to his own reckoning, it has been translated rather frequently and into various languages: French (1875), English (1911; reprint 1969), and German (1919). A trilingual edition, bringing together these existing translations as facsimiles, augmented with what could be called atmospheric fillers, engravings, and texts selected to round out the sixteenth-century context of Estienne's trade, was published on the occasion of the twentieth Frankfurt bookfair after WWII. Kammerer's volume is the first to provide an edition together with three new translations, by Anne-Hélène Klinger-Dollé (French), Claudia Wiener and Maria Anna Oberlinner (German), and Paul White (English), that follow the same standard and share an apparatus of identical content and structure in all three versions. The Latin text and the French translation are presented facing each other, while the German and English versions follow. Kammerer's introduction, also offered in French, German, and English (translated by Paul White), brims with erudition and highlights the Frankfurt fair's bearings on sixteenth-century literature, such as Estienne's account of an automatic roasting spit that found its way into Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel. It documents the importance of the fair in terms of providing a forum for novelties and curiosities, as well as rare and luxury products from all over Europe—the bookfair, while undeniably a hallmark for the trade, being rather a special-interest section than the heart of the event.

While this edition takes the scholarly discussion and contextualization of the text to a new level, it relegates a crucial question to the footnotes: that of genre. Estienne relates his work to paradoxical encomia in his introductory remarks, yet Kammerer dismisses this important hint as a gesture of modesty. It is this characterization, however, that merits more scholarly attention: while earlier scholars could not detect a unifying principle in the various texts that make up Estienne's volume, they do indeed feed into the early modern paradoxia endemica so convincingly described by Rosalie Colie. While this fact is not given due attention in the small booklet, the editor and the translators have to be thanked for providing an excellent edition that will serve as a starting point for the further pursuit of this question.