The first folio Bible printed in America, by the country’s “patriot printer,” Isaiah Thomas. Dubbed “the Baskerville of America” by Benjamin Franklin, Isaiah Thomas issued a folio and a quarto Bible simultaneously, and Wright notes that “The two Thomas Bibles of 1791 were without doubt far in advance of any.....
First American edition. A very scarce—and complicated—Jacob Johnson primer, first published in London by W. Darton & J. Harvey in 1802. Of particular appeal for the inclusion of an engraving depicting “Patrick O’Brien the Irish Giant and Peter Davis the welch Dwarf,” whose purpose seems solely to entertain, as it.....
An 1833 Boston edition of this immensely popular treatise on human sexuality, with three companion tracts. The Works of Aristotle is a fascinatingly diverse volume, its four sections running the gamut from titillating accounts of emerging adolescent sexual desire and step-by-step guides on how to conceive a specific gender of.....
Second edition of this important pre-Revolution abolitionist text by “the single most prolific antislavery writer and the most influential advocate of the Negro’s rights on either side of the Atlantic,” published a year after the first edition and appearing both separately and, as here, in a sammelband with various other.....
One of the best contemporary accounts of the 1745 Siege of Louisbourg, with considerable detail on strategy, defenses, munitions, men, etc. by the influential American clergyman Charles Chauncy. Dedicating some eight pages of his sermon to the siege, Chauncy addresses the events leading up to it, the remarkably speedy preparations.....
First edition of “the first great philosophical work by an American” (Reese) and among the most significant intellectual achievements of colonial America. This copy with a Tuttle family provenance and a matrilineal connection to the author. While Edwards is perhaps best remembered for his fire and brimstone sermon, Sinners in.....
An account of the founding and initial operation of the first hospital established in the English colonies, with a revealing autograph letter of transmittal and solicitation to one Thomas Worth signed by Hospital managers John Smith and John Reynell. Written by Franklin at the request of the Hospital trustees, the.....
Third American edition of Hannah More's classic moral saga contrasting the lives of two apprentice shoemakers. Each numbered part begins with a caption title and a woodcut. Jack Brown comes from a non-religious family and (as a result) is dishonest. James Stock is a religious, honest, and hardworking man. As.....
A beautiful copy in original boards of the first printing of the first furniture finisher’s manual published in the United States, reprinted from the first British edition of the same year. Described on the title-page as a “New Edition, with considerable Additions,” this first American edition provides concise instructions on.....
The first nine issues of this continuation in magazine form of Isaiah Thomas’ newspaper The Massachusetts Spy, a format to which Thomas resorted as a means of avoiding recently instituted tariffs on paper and taxes on newspaper advertisements. In a broadside he published addressing the matter Thomas observed “The tax.....