The Isle Of Pines (1668): and An Essay in Bibliography by Worthington Chauncey Ford — John Shaqi
The Isle Of Pines (1668): and An Essay in Bibliography by Worthington Chauncey FordNeville, Henry
General
The Isle Of Pines (1668): and An Essay in Bibliography by Worthington Chauncey Ford
Neville, Henry
Voyages, Imaginary -- Early works to 1800
No other London imprint is to be found there or in the larger libraries
of England. Of the three other copies located, that sold at audion (the
White Kennett copy) and that in the Massachusetts Historical Society
came direct from England, and the actual provenance of the copy in the
New York Historical Society is not known. It belonged to Rufus King,
long United States minister near the court of St James's, and is bound
with other tracts under a general title of "Topographical Collection,
Vol. I." The binding, Mr. Kelby tells me, is American. There is no mark
to show when or where King obtained the pamphlet, and the Society
did not receive it until 1906. That Rufus King belongs as much to
Massachusetts as to New York is too slight a foundation on which to
erect a claim that this particular tract was of Massachusetts origin.
In no case, therefore, can an American setting to any one of the four
known copies of the S. G. "Isle of Pines" be [22]established.{1} The
probabilities are all against Samuel Green. The incident is a good
example of the danger of giving play to the imagination on an appearance
of a combination of fads cemented by interest.
Thus disappears from our memory the certain identification of the S. G.
pamphlet as an early issue of the press in Cambridge, and with it goes
my identification of the Johnson pamphlet with the S. G. title-page--a
veritable pipe dream. It might be urged that as White Kennett was
collecting on America, it would be more than probable that he would
have had an American issue; but his own catalogue of 1713 describes the
nine-page tract, and that is our London edition. I might claim still
that my Johnson was a Johnson, with a London title-page; but the
typographical adornment on the first page of its text is just the same
as the adornment on the first page of the London issue--three rows
of fleur-de-lys, thirty-seven in each row, and the same kind of type
characters.{2}
1 Lowndes indexes it under George Pine, and describes a
nine-page trait--probably the one now in the British Museum.
He quotes a sale of a copy in it 60 (Puttkk) for £4.10s. He
indexes the combined parts under Sloetten, and notes a copy,
with the plate, sold in the White Knights sale for 1s..
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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