Booksellers’ Listings in 2015 and Recent Library Acquisitions

• • Both Blackwell’s and Marrins’s bookshops have listed an unrecorded edition of the best-selling devotional manual first published in 1673: Officium Eucharisticum: A Preparatory Service to a Devout and Worthy Reception of the Lord’s Supper by London divine Edward Lake, D.D.: “The Twenty Sixth Edition. To which is added, a Meditation for every Day in the Week” (Printed by Geo. James for Abel Roper, and sold by Jos. Hazard and Tho. Butler, 1721), 12mo: pp. [viii], 160. Both copies are in cont. calf: Blackwell’s with a double gilt fillet border and gilt cornerpieces and Marrins’s blind-stamped borders and a plain spine (both c. $315). The ESTC records the 25th edition of 1716, and then Dublin and London editions in 1724. Lake had been chaplain to the daughters of James Duke of York, and this edition reprints the dedication to Princess Mary, first employed in the third edition (1677) and signed “E. Lake” (only the two previous editions alluded to this relation: “Designed for a Person of Quality”). The book was otherwise published anonymously in recognition of its being a “collection.” Lake’s Sixteen Sermons preached upon Several Occasions was posthumously published in 1705, the year after his death. On earlier editions of these sermons he is usually styled “Rector of the United Parishes of St. Mary at Hill, and St. Andrew Hubbard.”

• • In Catalogue 114, Christmas 2014, De Búrca Rare Books listed Narcissus Marsh’s The Charge Given by Narcissus Lord Arch-Bishop of Dublin, to the Clergy, of the Province of Leinster, at his Primary Triennial Visitation, Anno Dom. 1694. Together with his Articles of Visitation. Whereunto are annext Three Acts of Parliament, which are to be Read in every Parish-Church Yearly (Dublin, Printed by Joseph Ray near the Customhouse, 1694), quarto: pp. [vi], 47 [1]; in modern quarter calf (=C1475; illustrating the title-page; still available). Although De Búrca takes this to be a hitherto unrecorded variant, it is ESTC R180377 and Wing M735A, with the words “to the Clergy” after “Dublin” omitted from the ESTC’s transcription. Still it is noteworthy as only two copies had been recorded (Trinity College Dublin, on EEBO, and Cashel Cathedral).

• • Joseph J. Felcone of Princeton offers An Act for the Further Limitation of the Crown, and Better Securing the Rights and Liberties of the Subject (“Dublin: Printed by J. Whalley, next door to the Fleece in St. Nicholas-Street, for Mat. Gunne, in Essex-Street, 1701”), 4to, 4 pp., ESTC N51406, beginning the title with Anno XII. & XIII. Gulielmi III. Regis and citing five copies in two Dublin libraries. John Whalley is better known as Dublin’s principal astrologer from 1685 through to his death in 1724, prognosticating with unusual confidence. Another major trade was vending his medicinal “golden pills,” and he published multiple newspapers beginning in 1714. During his first two years as a printer, 1699–1700, Whalley printed about a dozen works at the address in An Act above. He was then Dublin’s most anti-Catholic printer, recommending savage measures against priests after being pilloried in 1688 and fleeing to England for more than a year. Accordingly, there are ideological implications in all his relations in the trade. Everything he printed is rare.

• • A. R. Heath is offering a satirical print of a journalist: an “ugly man” with exaggerated facial features stands in a wild area, facing left and reading from a paper, behind him on the ground is a tipped keg spilling liquor and a pegasus flying away in the background; beneath is a motto from Pope’s The Dunciad, Book I: “To My Country I My Pen Consign” (the rhyming line thereafter reads “Yes, from this Moment, mighty [Nathaniel] Mist! am thine”; price £750). Heath notes the imprint on the verso is “Acc’to Act of Parl on May ye 7th 1738.”

• • A. R. Heath also lists a manuscript transcription of Matthew Prior’s “Henry and Emma,” first published in his Poems on Several Occasions (1709) and not published separately till late in the century: folio, 21 pp. plus three blank pages...