Obj. ID: 36034  Yadot Nedarim by Yosef Shaul Nathanson, Lemberg, 1851

This text was prepared by William Gross:

Lemberg (Lviv) began its course of development into one of the key centers of nineteenth-century Hebrew print with the arrival in the 1780s of several printing families from Żółkiew (Zhovkva) in the 1780s; they came under orders from the new Habsburg regime.
In 1830 Yehuda Leib Balaban of Brodi established a printing house in Lemberg. By the time this book was printed, the business was run by his son, Pinchas Moshe. After Pinchas Moshe's death, the press was taken over by his widow, Pesel Balaban. Pesel was already very active in the press while her husband was alive, but it was only after his death that she expanded the press, producing high-quality editions of halakhic texts such as the Shulhan Arukh (Code of Jewish Law).
The Gross Family Collection includes titles issued by all three of these figures - Yehuda Leib (B.1375), Pinchas Moshe (B.528), and Pesel Balaban (B.1116).
The monogram of Pinchas Moshe Balaban, used previously by his father, is an entwined LB (Leib Balaban). It is emblazoned on a shield flanked by two horns filled with flowers, and topped by a rampant lion (also an allusion to the name Leib) holding what, according to Ya'ari, is a printing mechanism. A very similar mark was used by the Prague printer Moshe Israel Landau (Ya'ari 199, and see B.584). Ya'ari suggests that Balaban copied the design from Landau.