Provenance: An interesting array of ownership inscriptions: “Abigail Davis Book Given her By her Friend [Master?] Vaughan” — “Abigail Davis Book”— “Abigail Davis” — “Abigail Vaughan, Her Book,” this last written largest of all.  (“Reader, I married him”?)

•  Evans 27179; ESTC W33646.   Contemporary sheep, binding overall showing scuffs and small cracks. Endpapers and fly-leaf with early inked ownership inscriptions; title-page verso institutionally rubber-stamped. Pages age-toned and spotted, with intermittent pencilled bracketing; a few leaves starting to separate. (20808)

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.

•  Publisher's blue cloth, front cover and spine stamped in black and gilt; cloth a bit rubbed over edges and extremities, spine gilt showing some rubbing, front cover with very small spot of discoloration near lower outer corner. Hinges (inside) cracking, volume firm however. One page with a bit of light staining and two numbers marked in colored pencil, pages otherwise clean. All edges gilt. (15005)