text: Although Agricola died in 1555, the publication was delayed until the completion of the extensive and detailed woodcuts one year after his death.
  A German translation was published in 1557 and a second Latin edition appeared in 1561.  A version in Spanish, though not a mere translation, was produced by Bernardo Pérez de Vargas in 1569. This was translated into French as Traité singulier de metallique in 1743.
  In 1912, the first English translation of De Re Metallica was privately published in London by subscription. The translators and editors were Herbert Hoover, a mining engineer (and later President of the United States), and his wife, Lou Henry Hoover, a geologist and Latinist. The translation is notable not only for its clarity of language, but for the extensive footnotes, which detail the classical references to mining and metals, such as the Naturalis Historia of Pliny the Elder, the history of mining law in England, France, and the German states; safety in mines, including historical safety; and known minerals at the time that Agricola wrote De Re Metallica. No expense was spared for this edition: in its typography, fine paper and binding, quality of reproduced images, and vellum covers, the publisher attempted to match the extraordinarily high standards of the sixteenth-century original.  As a consequence, copies of this 1912 edition are now both rare and valuable.  Fortunately, the translation has been reprinted by Dover Books.
  Subsequent translations into other languages, including German, owe much to the Hoover translations, as their footnotes detail their difficulties with Agricola's invention of several hundred Latin expressions to cover Medieval German mining and milling terms unknown to classical Latin.