WOMEN

Dance of Death Chapbook — “Très Rare”

Click the images for enlargements.

•  Wonderfully “antique” style printing of the classic French Dance of Death, textually revised but still based solidly on Marchant’s original work of 1486, and making use of its woodcut designs. Issued as a chapbook,”Marchant” was sold by peddlers and at fairs, and was one of the most popular educational picture books in Europe since the Middle Ages. It contains two sections: First the Dance of Death of men of all ranks and professions and after that the Dance of Death of women of various ranks and stations in life.

Over60 large woodcuts illustrate the text, with some images appearing in both sections. The volume concludes with several poems on the themes of life, death, and the afterlife.

Though an 18th-century printing of a “reformed” version, this production respects its original and has the typographic look of early post-incunables.

Uncommon: We trace only nine copies in the U.S., all but one in libraries east of the Mississippi.

Binding: 19th-century calf by F. Bedford with that firm’s minute stamp on front free endpaper; covers framed in gilt triple fillets. Spine gilt extra, with gilt-stamped leather title and publication labels. Gilt inner dentelles, french-combed endpapers, and all edges red.

•  Fairfax-Murray, French, 108; Morin, Bibliothèque bleue de Troyes, 435; Nisard, Histoire des Livres Populaires, II, 303. Binding with minor scuffing at corners and old (good) repairs to head and foot of spine, with leather starting to crack over joints; hinges tender. Pages slightly age-toned, with signature marks shaved.

Churchlady Cookery

•  Church group cookbook, with much illustrated local advertising matter. Among the recipes are cocoanut soup, planked shad, and reed bird dumplings, in addition to a number of more typical contemporary dishes.

•  Not in Brown, Culinary Americana. Publisher's quarter cloth with printed paper wrappers; wrappers showing only very minor wear, pages a bit age-toned but otherwise clean. (16647)

American Gift Book — TwoILLUMINATED Leaves  

•  Ornately bound gift book, illustrated with four steel-engraved plates. This is a different work from both the New York item of the same name published in 1847 and the literary collection of the same name edited by Sarah Josepha Hale; the present volume opens with an illuminated presentation leaf (left blank here) and illuminated additional title-page, while the text begins with Felicia Hemans's “Woman and Fame” and closes with Southey's “Remembrance.” The publisher issued the Wreath in the present undated variant and also with a publication line giving 1855.

Binding: Publisher's red morocco, covers and spine gilt extra in foliate designs with cherubim at play. All edges gilt.

•  Faxon 457a.   Binding as above, front joint just starting at top and bottom, edges and extremities showing very slight wear, gilt slightest bit rubbed in spots; overall bright and handsome. Light age-toning and spotting throughout.In remarkably good condition, unusually bright.  (20886)

“DoYOU Know the Secret?”

•  First edition (not an on-demand reprint) of this charming romance novel about a young girl learning, with her godmother's help, to take joy in connecting with others over the simple pleasures in life. The two plates (one of which is reproduced on the dust jacket front cover) were done by A.I. Keller; the front board beneath the jacket is printed with an attractive morning glory design (unsigned) in green, cream, black, and gold over blue.

•  Publisher's paper-covered boards, front cover as above, in original dust wrapper; binding very slightly cocked, paper just starting to crack along part of back joint, jacket sunned with edges and extremities rubbed, back corner creased, and a few small edge nicks. Front free endpaper with bookseller's small ticket.  (24488)

Quaker Meditations — A Neat Compendium
  Two Women in the Contents — Womanly Provenance, Too

•  Law's mystically-inclined meditations sold vigorously in a number of English and American editions; they serve here as the introduction to an interesting selection of Christian inspirational readings from Philadelphia printer Joseph Crukshank—some writers named, and some not. The Considerations on Slavery are designated simply as those of a "number of different authors"; the Remarks on . . . Liquors, which aims to promote health and happiness rather than directly religious concerns, is attributed by ESTC to Anthony Benezet, as is the volume's last piece, the title of which is taken from its opening lines. Lady Elizabeth Hastings was the original for Aspasia in Steele's "Tatler" and a major donor to Oxford University Queen's College.

Elizabeth Webb, "an acknowledged minister among the people called Quakers," first encountered Prince George of Denmark's chaplain Boehm while on a visit to Great Britain; the missive with which she opened her subsequent correspondence with him, here, greatly inspired him and a number of his friends.

Provenance: With inscription reading "Miss Hannah Amelia Moore / Book a Present from her worthy / Friend Ruth Patton / 1789."


•  Law: ESTC W32233; Evans 16817; Hildeburn 3987. Webb: ESTC W13440; Evans 18295; Hildeburn 4409. Benezet: ESTC W6416; Evans 18355. Contemporary quarter sheep over paper-covered sides, the whole worn and abraded but the little volume quite sound. Light age-toning, occasional darker spots. Small chip in bottom margin of title-page; one leaf with paper flaw in lower corner, resulting in the loss of a very few letters.

Progressive Charity

•  Susan I. Lesley was a Unitarian and shared a politically progressive vision with her husband J. Peter Lesley, the notable geologist and leader of the American Philosophical Society. Here she addresses the members of a charity organization in Philadelphia's Seventh Ward, a predominantly African-American section of the city though there is no particular sign of that in the text. Click the image to the right
for an enlargement.

Provenance:  Inscribed by the author to William C. Gannett, at top margin of p. [1]. Gannett spent three years in the 1860s working among freedmen in the South; he was afterwards to become a Unitarian minister and pastor of the church where Susan B. Anthony worshipped.

•  Original dark blue wrappers. A couple of tiny tears at top edge of front cover. Very good.  (20940)

NO Woman Ought to Be Without THIS BOOK
  Said theLadies' National Magazine

•  An extremely popular collection of recipes and household tips, written by a successful novelist who became an equally successful domestic authority. Leslie was known for her distinctly American take on cookbooks, as well as for pioneering the easy-to-read listing of ingredients and quantities at the beginning of recipes in her Seventy-Five Receipts for Pastry, Cakes and Sweetmeats — although the present work does not follow that structure. The New Receipts were originally published in 1854. Click the interior image for an enlargement.

•  Bitting 285; Lowenstein, American Cookery Books, 637 (for first ed.); see Cagle & Stafford for earlier editions.   Publisher's brown cloth, front cover and spine with gilt-stamped title; binding slightly cocked, front joint cracked and reinforced with tape, cloth rubbed at edges and extremities, sides with spots of faint discoloration. Pp. 259–62 excised (being from the “household helps” section, not the cookery). One pencilled annotation. A very few light spots, otherwise clean. Not a great copy, but plenty of great reading and browsing.  (23548)

A Moral Tale?

•  Title woodcut vignette of a woman kneeling at an altar. In the six-page ballad “Fair Rosamond”, Henry II builds a tower with a hundred and fifty entrances at Woodstock, near Oxford. The tower serves as a safe house for his mistress, the fair Rosamond. So complex is its architecture that those who enter must follow a thread to find their way out. When Henry has to leave to put down a rebellion in France, the jealous Queen Eleanor wounds the knight who guards the tower, follows the thread to Rosamond's chamber and murders her by forcing her to drink poison.

This Stirling printing is rare. There is also a Glasgow printing of which OCLC locates only 6 copies worldwide.

•  Original self wrappers (unbound, removed). The bottom corner of the second leaf is lightly chipped and the pages are somewhat darkened. Good. (17552)

Love, Treachery, Devotion & Desperation     

•  Popular fiction of the melodramatic sort. Rare: Wright located only one copy of the Holbrook edition of the same year and merely notes, without locations, this edition. OCLC locates only two copies of this edition. Click either image for an enlargement.

•  Wright, American Fiction, II, 781. Ex-Library: Quarter faux pebbled leather over marbled paper: spine rebacked with masking tape partially covering library label on front cover; edges of covers chipped. Title-page detached and chipped with paper repairs on edges of verso; interior generally spotted and stained with some dog-earing and shallow chipping—all with no apparent loss or obscuring of impression. Final leaf (pp. 63–64) lacking. Charge pocket on rear pastedown. (9500)

Proving thatPolygamy is Enjoined upon Christians

Click the images for enlargements.

•  Third and best edition of a treatise in defense of polygamy, originally titled Theophili Aletaei discursus politicus de Polygamia. This greatly expanded version was printed in Lund, Sweden; earlier editions were much briefer. Depending on which account you prefer, this scandalous work may have been written either to please the author's patron, who had grown tired of his wife, or to advance the author's dream of founding a polygamous sect. Lyserus, also known as Lyser or Leyser, was a Lutheran pastor before the infamy this book earned him sent him wandering in exile; he travelled through Germany, Denmark, and Sweden until his death in 1684.

According to the online cataloguing of this book at Brigham Young University, “Early editions [were] burnt by [the] hangman in Denmark (1676); in Sweden (1679) . . . the possession of a copy meant a 1000 ducat fine. This edition was added to the Index of forbidden books in 1687.” It is often held today in medical libraries.

•  Graesse, I, 68.   17th-century speckled calf, spine gilt extra with gilt-stamped leather title-label; leather acid-pitted, front joint (outside) cracked, edges rubbed. Front pastedown with Parisian bookseller's ticket; front free endpaper with pencilled annotation; back pastedown with rubber-stamped date in 1908. Slip of old printed cataloguing laid in.  (23549)

Fresh Pretty Covers

Malet, Lucas[pseud. of Mary St. Leger Kingsley Harrison].

•  Second U.S. edition of this 1901 bestseller—probably the author's best-known work .

•  Publisher's tan cloth, with borders and letters stamped in black, green, and red; binding showing slight wear and soiling over edges and corners, otherwise clean and bright. Front cover with a rectangular full-color illustration on-lay of a country estate. Previous owner's signature on the front free endpaper, owner's bookplate on the front pastedown. Clean, tight. Very good. (5799)

A Dissertation . . .

•  On marriage of minors; first printed in 1721. This is among our selection of 18th-century German dissertations and treatises on Law — each is in Latin; each is small quarto and removed from a one-time binding.

And Another, This One on DIVORCE . . .    Boehmer, Justus Henning, praeses. ...De ivre principis evangelici circa divortia.... Halae Magdeburgicae: Stanno Grunertiano, [1715]. Small 4to. [1] f., 70 pp.
$95.00

•  Inaug. diss. — Halle (Johann Friedrich Kayser, respondent), 1715.

•  Sometime bound in a nonce volume (removed).

For more 18TH-CENTURY GERMAN,
LATIN LANGUAGE
LEGAL DISSERTATIONS,  click here.

A “Way” of Life — & DEATH

•  Unusual as a woman who printed under her own name, Mary Hinde was a successful printer and publisher of numerous Quaker items. Click the image to the left
for an enlargement.

•  Removed from a nonce volume. Wanting final leaf of advertisements. Light foxing and traces of soiling. Closely trimmed by the binder, with loss of last letters of lines on a few pages, but without loss of sense. (9216)

Cruikshank's Plague — “It's my Cousin, M'am” & “The Cats Did It”

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•  First edition, in original parts, illustrated with12 etched plates and a cover “Glyphograph” by George Cruikshank. Written by regular Punch contributors the Mayhew brothers and told in the first person, this novel treats a subject often visited in Punch: the comically ineffective servant girl. Cruikshank's witty illustrations are “expansively good-natured,” according to Robert L. Patten in George Cruikshank: A Revaluation (p. 118), and emphasize the joyful absurdity of their subjects.

Issued in six monthly installments in printed wrappers, the sextet is contained in a red morocco and cloth clamshell case.

•  NSTC 2M21803; Cohn, Bibliographical Catalogue of the Works Illustrated by George Cruikshank, 527.   Clamshell case as above, spine with gilt-stamped publication information. Wrappers age-toned, especially so on pt. I, and with small stains on pts. I and VI; spine and edges of pt. I rubbed. Pages and plates clean.  (23942)

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