•  Rosenbach, Jewish, 636; Singerman, Judaica Americana, 1024; Goldman 37.   Binding as above, in splendid condition. Small bookplate as above. Interior virtually pristine, with service for Purim an exception showing use. A marvelous copy with a significant provenance.  (32645)

The volume opens with awood-engraved illustration of the saloon, done by Philadelphia artist Charles H. Reed. Author James was a medical officer in the Union army and also published Two Years in the Service, or, the Personal Recollections of a Medical Officer and A Complete History of the Great Rebellion; or, the Civil War in the United States.

Binding:  Publisher's textured green cloth, front cover with gilt-stamped vignette of the shop and a very large American flag, taken from the frontispiece; back cover with same vignette in blind. Spine with a bit of gilt embellishment at top and bottom, gilt-stamped title.

Provenance:  Front free endpaper with inked inscription: “Compliments of Mrs. A. Horner Phila. July 4th 1876"; also with rubber-stamp of Samuel Hoffman, a Philadelphia collector and dealer of presidential and political material; and finally with inked inscription: “To the LIbrarian U. of Chattanooga Sept. 13, 1957 from John C. Daub,” a Pittsburgh rare book dealer.

•  Sabin 50402.   Bound as above, corners and spine extremities rubbed. Front free endpaper with inscriptions and stamp as above. A clean, solid copy.  (29560)

Click the images for enlargements.

As is the case with the 70 p. issue, the first 16 p. are the same sheets as appear in the original [Richmond, April 1792] edition (Evans 26580), and were probably printed in 1791. Evans, however, postulates that the first 16 p. were printed by Dobson in September 1792. He accounts for their presence in copies of the [Richmond] edition of 60 p. by suggesting that Asplund substituted the corrected Philadelphia sheets for the unsatisfactory sheets of the earlier edition. Cf. the prefaces to the 1794 and 1796 editions, with title: The universal register of the Baptist denomination.”

In addition to its exhaustive account of who's who and what's where, this lists both principles of belief and “Rules of Decorum”; the latter, e.g., forbid laughing and whispering when another member of the association is speaking in assembly. Between the “Rules of Decorum” and the Index, Asplund remarks on the un-Christian “inconsistency” of “Keeping our fellow-creatures in bondage, who have as good a right was we, both to civil and religions liberty — Not only so; but misusing them, concerning common blessings, which certainly is a violation of the rights of nature and inconsistent with a republican government.”

•  Evans 26582; ESTC W37302.   Uncut copy. In 20th-century black buckram binding. Ex-library with bookplate but no other markings.  (24467)

•  Shaw & Shoemaker 7007. Original light boards covered with marbled paper. Back cover and two leaves gnawed by a rodent, with loss of paper. (3512)

Added at end of vol. 3 and paged separately here is “Death of Cicero, a Fragment.”

Provenance:  Ex–social club library (the German Society of Pennsylvania): each volume with its 19th-century bookplate, call number label on spine and number on pastedown, pressure-stamp on title-page; no other markings.

•  Shaw & Shoemaker 237; Wright, I, 421; BAL 1500.   Full speckled sheep with round spines and black leather spine labels, binding from ca. 1820; abraded, front joints cracked and starting. Vol. I lacking front free endpaper and early leave of that volume detached at some time, crumpled, torn (repaired), and crudely reattached. Stains, some leaves closely cropped. One leaf in vol. II with natural paper flaw causing misprinting of some text; same volume missing final leaf of text . A tattered and stained and slightly imperfect set of a scarce early American novel.  (30263)

They address then-pressing topics: tariffs, protectionism, development of domestic industry, and European foreign policy ( NONE OF WHICH, of course, have ANY resonance today . . . ) .

•  Shaw & Shoemaker 49095; Clarkin, Mathew Carey Bibliography, 1133. Recent quarter tan cloth with paper sides in the style of the era; lightly soiled and the neat paper label with a small stain. Ex-library with stamp on title-page; paper brittle and age-toned, signatures wanting to separate (again) from spine (and some doing so). One page torn and repaired.

Provenance:  Flourishing old signatures of “J. Lowry” to pastedown and title-page.

•  Publisher's printed paper wrappers and brown cloth shelfback, wrappers lightly soiled. A few light smudges to pages.  (27651)

Throughout his life Challoner “labored to save Catholicism in England from extinction; his writings and preachings served to strengthen the faith of the Catholic minority . . .” (New Catholic Encyclopedia, 438). His readable, revised edition of the Douay–Rheims Bible (1749–52) served as the English Catholic standard until quite recently.

Provenance: Released as a duplicate from the greatest collection of American Catholica in the world, the Georgetown University Library, with a few of the requisite and expected stamps.

•  Parsons 461; Shaw & Shoemaker 31112. On Challoner, see: New Catholic Encyclopedia, III, 437–438.   Contemporary treed sheep, spine with chipped, gilt-stamped red leather title-label; binding abraded, covers a bit sprung, spine with paper shelving label and some cracking of leather. Title-page and one other stamped as described above; pages age-toned. A “decent” copy.  (5306)

nothing new since my last, exceptCapt. Barney in the ship Hyder Aly taking the King ship Monk of 10 nine pounders, in an action of 30 minutes. The Hyder Aly mounted 6 nines & 10 sixes, there never was more execution done by the same force in the same time. The Monk had every officer except two, killed or wounded, amongst the latter was the Capt. She had in all 21 kill'd & 32 wounded. The Hyder Aly had 4 kill'd & 11 wounded, from such slaughter no doubt you'd conclude one of them boarded, but it was not the case, a fair action within pistol shot.

Although the land battles of the American Revolution had ended with the surrender at Yorktown, sea battles continued until receipt of the signing of the Treaty of Paris. The account above refers to Comm. Joshua Barney's capture on 8 April off Cape May, NJ, of the sloop of war General Monk. In a wonderful twist of fate, the intrepid Barney had only arrived in Philadelphia in March — having been occupied since the previous May with his escape, recapture, and second escape from Portsmouth prison! into which stronghold he had been clapped by the British for his previous maritime (infr)actions.

Having, then, been given command of the Hyder Ally (a.k.a., Hyder Ali) only a few weeks previously, and having been charged with clearing the Delaware River and Bay of privateers, Barney had met the General Monk while pursuing that task — and, in a Revolutionary War naval action eclipsed only by that of the Bon Homme Richard and the Serapis, took on and thoroughly defeated a King's ship of superior firepower in a bloody, 26-minute battle.

Following this capture of the General Monk, Congress voted Barney a sword for his gallantry and offered him command of his prize after renaming her General Washington. In November, 1782, he was ordered to sail to France in the Washington with dispatches for Benjamin Franklin who was negotiating the Treaty of Paris. He returned with news of the signing of the preliminary peace treaty and with money from the French.

Barney was an American Hornblower!

•  On Barney, see: Dictionary of American Biography and Appleton's Cyclopedia.   Very good condition. Small blank portion of the integral address leaf torn with loss where the sealing wax was attached. Old dealer's (Sessler's) coding in pencil at base of letter.  (31069)