CONNECTICUT

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“Oriental” Romance forCT Subscribers

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•  Reprint of an oriental tale in the style of the “Arabian Nights” romance, an extremely popular genre in the 18th century. First edition was London, 1762. At the end are an extract from Robinson's History of Baptism about the Anabaptists in Germany, a short story on simple true love entitled “Rural felicity,” an ode to solitude, a poem celebrating “female excellence,” and a very interesting subscriber's list bristling with Connecticut names and places.

Provenance: Bookplate of Thomas Longley (Hawley).

•  Evans 35710; Trumbull, Connecticut, 2313; ESTC W3365. Old calf with remnants of black leather spine label; leather with one gouge to back cover and a bit abraded overall. Tear and chip to front free endpaper; title-page with tiny edge tears. Small wormhole at base of initial three leaves, not touching print. Some leaves extruded with shallow tattering. Bookplate as above on front free endpaper. Offsetting from leather of cover and a brown blot or stain at outer margin of title- and following page; same offsetting to last leaves; some general staining and an ink "x-mark" in margin of one other page. This seems to have been read with enthusiasm! (20994)

Gould, Vinson. A sermon, delivered at East-Haven, (Connecticut) January 13, 1808, at the ordination of the Reverendaul Clark, work of the gospel ministry in that place.... New-Haven: Pr. by Oliver Steele & Co., 1803. 8vo. 24 pp.
$25.00

•  Gould was the pastor of "the church in Southampton, Massachusetts."

•  Shaw & Shoemaker 4297. Sewn in original blue-green wrappers which are a bit tattered. Number stamped on front wrapper. Uncut copy.

"Great Connecticut Names" (Pseudonymous Division)

Hold-Fast, Simon, [pseud.].

•  Pro-Federalist, anti-Republican tract that is well written and shows reasoning of the non-strident school. Very good political content.

Provenance: Ownership signature of Ezra S. Ely, D.D.

•  Shaw & Shoemaker 4393. Removed from a nonce volume. Respined with archival tissue. Six-digit number stamped on title-page. Some age-toning and occasional light foxing.

FromRomulus Augustulus to Louis Philippe

Koch, Christopher William.

•  Translated by Andrew Crichton from the original French, a History of the Revolutions in Europe gives the history of revolution beginning with the fall of the Roman Empire, including the French and American Revolutions (in the former of which Koch played a part) and ending with the French revolution of 1830. Included are a total of 24 wood-engraved illustrations on 12 plates, some of which are signed “JWB” and one of which is signed “B.”

•  Contemporary publisher’s mottled sheep; spine gilt extra. Fine abrasions or chipping to leather, especially to head and foot of spine. Offsetting from turn-ins; lightly foxed throughout. A closed tear without loss in pp. 327–28. All edges marbled.

•  Catalogue 6. 100 items; 103 illustrations.

•  Printed green wrappers. Light damage to spine paper, with minor loss of paper. Very good copy.

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Cold-War Comedy — 1957

•  First edition: Comedy in aConnecticut suburb, involving sex, soldiers, and missiles.

•  Dust jacket slightly yellowed and showing minor wear; generally a clean, nice copy . (5031)

Dedicated to “Patrons ofPure,
     Perfect, & Unpolluted Liberty”

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•  A history of three members of the tribunal which had Charles I beheaded in 1649, by the former president of Yale College, a post which he held from 1778 to his death in 1795. Plates III, VIII and IX were engraved by Amos Doolittle; plate 7 is not present here nor is there any copy known to have it present. (Sabin categorically states: “there is no plate 7 in any of the copies seen, and it is probable none was made.”)

•  Evans 27743; Howes S-999; Sabin 91742; Trumbull, Connecticut, 1425.   Period-style quarter calf with marbled paper–covered sides, spine with gilt-stamped leather title and author labels and blind-tooled floral decorations in compartments. Previous owner's signature on the title-page. Rubber-stamps of the Mercantile Library, and inked marks and underlining inside, with scattered marginalia. Frontispiece portrait lacking, with eight plates (three of which are fold-out) present; each of the three folding plates with a split along one fold. Occasional marginal tears and small chips to corners; waterstaining and foxing, yet paper strong and reading easy.  (3996)

Kempis forCONNECTICUT

•  The authorship of the Imitation of Christ was questioned for three centuries, but scholarly consensus now favors Thomas à Kempis, leaving little or no room for such contenders as Jean Gerson. This translation from the original Latin is the work of an English Protestant who has sought to de-Catholicize the work as far as possible: Quotations from the Bible, which in the Latin are given from the Vulgate Bible (i.e., the Roman Catholic authorized text), in their English translations here are given from the King James and not the Douai-Rheims or Challoner versions.

The first printing of the Imitation appeared in 1473 and there followed hundreds of European editions before the first American appeared 1749. It was as popular with the American audience as it had been in Europe, and it appeared here in English and German translation and even in an extracted form, almost always redone for Protestants.

This is the first printing of the Imitation in Connecticut.

•  Shoemaker 9094; Parsons 778. On the translator, see: The Dictionary of National Biography. Contemporary sheep with a near-contemporary over-covering of another sheep binding—with a rectangle cut out to expose the original spine label. Over-covering very plain. Expectable foxing and a certain amount of staining; a "decent" copy made interesting by the careful early "conservation" of the binding.

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