Scribleriana Transferred, Printed Materials for Sale, 2017–2018

• This column attends often to unrecorded editions and issues on the market, and I begin with one. George Bayntun of Bath illustrates and describes John Haywood’s The Precious Blood of the Son of God (for Robert Gifford, in Old Bedlam, without Bishops Gate, 1706), 12mo (152 × 89 mm.): woodcut frt “with three biblical images”; pp. [vi], 114, in cont. sheep with blind double fillet borders, signed “Robert Beck His Book 1706” (c. $404). This “Eighteenth Edition” is not in ESTC, where seven editions are recorded 1696–1731, Gifford’s 10th edition appearing in 1699 and his 29th in 1717. (North American editions occurred in at least 1703 and 1712).

• Blackwell’s of Oxford lists Sir John Hartopp’s copy of John Owen’s Meditations and Discourses on the Glory of Christ, in his Person, Office, and Grace; with The Differences between Faith and Sight (by A. M. and R. R., for Benjamin Alsop, 1684); ESTC R32196; 8vo: portrait frt; pp. [xxxii], 247; cont. black morocco with gilt panels; with bookplate of nineteenth-century “evangelical activist” John Poynder (c. $675). Hartopp has signed the flyleaf, and probably he or the author was responsible for MS corrections in the text. Blackwell’s notes that “Hartopp worshipped at the Leadenhall Street congregation of the Independent minister Dr. John Owen . . . . [and] made shorthand notes of Owen’s sermons and as a result thirteen were published for the first time in 1756 (ODNB).”

• Meyer Boswell offers a copy of George Meriton’s A Guide to Surveyors of the High-Way (Printed by W. Rawlins and S. Roycroft, for A. & J. Churchill, 1694), R23533, 8vo: pp. [24], 167, [1], which has appended an unrecorded catalogue for a substantial book-seller: Books Printed for, and sold by W. Crooke, at the Green-Dragon without Temple-Bar, 1693; 8 pp., with more than a hundred titles, the first being “The London Practice of Physick” (bottom edges trimmed with some text lost). ESTC records only two different Crooke catalogues: A Catalogue … Sold by William Crooke (Printed in the Year 1683), 8vo: pp. [2], 14; and Books Printed for William Crook [sic] at the Green Dragon without Temple Bar, no date, 4to: 8pp., with first entry for “Greek Testament.”

• Robert S. Brooks on Abebooks lists Giles Jacobs’s An Historical Account of the Lives and Writings of the Most Eminent English Poets … Adorned with Cutts. The Second Edition [woodcut of eagle with wings up looking right] (“Printed for E. Curll, in Burghley-Street, in the Strand, 1733. Price 6s.”), 8vo: A⁸ a⁸ B-X⁸ Y⁸ (Y8 + 1, errata leaf): pp. [xxvi], [6], 326, [8 index] [2, errata leaf] + 6 plates; the listed copy, in full leather, has title page stamped with the seal of “Beloit College” and a frt. ($225). No 1733 edition is in the ESTC, though OCLC records a copy at the National Library of Art (LVA). This bio-bibliographical work is a reissue of the first Curll edition in 1720 (as revealed by photographs shared by Brooks). Though it is Curll’s first variant-title reissue, he might have miscalled it the fourth edition, for the edition had been reissued as Vol. 2 of Jacobs’s Poetical Register in 1723 (A. Bettesworth, et al.) and by itself as Historical Account in 1724 (by W. Mears). All these issues share such features as the misnumbering of p. xiii as “xii”; the British Library (BL) copies of earlier issues on ECCO have the errata list last, as well, but some copies place it after the contents and before p. [1]. Copies have survived with varying plates; this copy lacks the frt with multiple portraits but has inserted plates with portraits of Broome, Butler, Gay, Howard, Milton, and Montagu. By contrast, the BL copy of the 1719 issue has the frt with Chaucer at the center of five medallion portraits and then plates of Devonshire, Creech, Croxall, John Philips, Pope, Prior, and John Duke of Buckingham, most cut by J. Clark. The BL copy on ECCO of the 1723 reissue has the frt with Shakespeare in the center of seven medallion...