Scribleriana Transferred: Printed Matter, 2010–2012, Continued (Part 2)

• • A. R. Heath frequently brings prints and illustrated broadsides of great rarity to market. Presently he offers folio broadsides printed on one side, with large illustrations of Merlin, or The Enchanter (n.d.), with woodcut. which Heath calls “A Satire on the General Election of 1747” (c. $3140), and of Elizabeth Canning at the House of Mother Wells at Enfield Wash (W. Herbert on London Bridge, March 3d, 1753), engraved (c. $814), both apparently unrecorded, both illustrated on AbeBooks.

• • One of William Reese’s unrecorded editions (several involve petitions to Parliament) is George Keith’s A Serious Call to the Quakers Inviting Them to Return to Christianity. To which is Added, A True Copy of the Last Will … of that Grand Imposter George Fox (G. Parker, n.d. [1715?]), 16 pp., untrimmed, disbound ($3000). This anti-Quaker polemic was first published in 1700, the year the ex-Quaker Keith entered the Anglican church, and as recently as 1709 in Boston (the text reprints the last known for London, 1706). This edition is the first to include George Fox’s will (in fraktur) followed by Keith’s comments, including “By this Will, This Imposter appears to be the Greatest Cheat” (p. 16). Reese dates it 1715 since the pamphlet was found in a contemporary binding with parliamentary petitions mostly dated 1715 and would have been relevant to a 1715 debate over revising “the ‘Solemn Affirmation’ the British government had granted them [Quakers] to take in place of an oath.”

• • The annotated copies of the avid Restoration book-buyer Narcissus Luttrell are frequently quoted for date and price information of publications. Quaritch’s Summer 2011 English Books offered a Luttrell copy dated 1675/6, two years prior to any listed in Stephen Parks’s The Luttrell File: Narcissus Luttrell’s Dates on Contemporary Pamphlets 1678–1730 (1999). It is the first edition of The Miss Display’d, with All Her Wheedling Arts and Circumventions … By the Author of the First Part of The English Rogue, that is, by Irish writer Richard Head (“sold by the several Booksellers,” 1675), 12mo: pp. [vi], 133, [1], with engraved frt of people at a brothel; ownership inscription of Luttrell dated 1675/6 and price 10d. at the head of the frt verso; inscribed “W. Musgrave” to title verso (£3000). Quaritch adds for provenance evidence that this was lot 702 in the 1786 sale of the library of Luttrell’s “descendent Edward Wynne.” Three copies only in the ESTC, and one of a second edition (1683), now apparently lost. This “true History” of a “notorious Irish-English Whore” follows her from innocence in Ulster to sin and financial success in Dublin, before her eventual arrest and escape to Paris.

• • The Morgan Library purchased from Ximenes’s 2012 Pope catalogue (Occasional List 110, item 140) An Essay on Man, Being the First Book of Ethic Epistles. To Henry St. John, L. Bolingbroke (Printed by John Wright, for Lawton Gilliver, 1734), Foxon P853; Griffith 337/338; inscribed on flyleaf, “Sir Francis Boileau from Lord Nugent’s Library” and with the book label of J. O. Edwards. The Morgan’s curator, John Bidwell, notes that “Sir Francis George Manningham Boileau married in 1860 Lucy Henrietta Nugent, daughter of Sir George Nugent, … great-grandson of the poet Robert Craggs Nugent, Earl Nugent.” In describing this issue and the copy bought by the Morgan (which already owned the earliest surviving manuscript of the poem), Bidwell writes:

  Pope had several copies printed on fine paper with an extra leaf containing a schematic plan for his “Ethic Epistles,” including a sequel to An Essay on Man. He later abandoned that idea and recalled the fine paper copies, but three have survived—this one, one in Texas [at Rice University], and one in England [at Cambridge, but in Harold Forster’s collection when noted by Foxon for English Verse 1701–1750]. This copy belonged to his friend and fellow poet Lord Nugent. The extra leaf appears to promise writings similar to An Essay on Reason (1735) by Walter Harte, a work Pope helped to publish and allowed to appear anonymously as...