731 résultats
1808354112Philadelphia: Printed by Jane Aitken 1808. First edition. 512; 490; 444; 472pp. 4 vols. 8vo. Contemporary full black morocco gil likely bound by Jane Aitken minor wear at joints one spine splitting but holding. First edition. 512; 490; 444; 472pp. 4 vols. 8vo. "Charles Thomson 1729-1824 made the first translation of the Septuagint into the English language and the first English translation of the New Testament in the western hemisphere. Thomson spent twenty years in making the translation. The books called Apocrypha which are included in the canon of the Greek Old Testament but not in the Hebrew were omitted in his translation. After copying the manuscript four times he had it published at Philadelphia by Jane Aitken the first woman to print any part of the Holy Scriptures in America and the daughter of the printer Robert Aitken. It is of interest that the name 'Cha. Thomson' appears as the signer of the Congressional resolution in the front of the 1782 Aiken Bible" Hills.<br /> <br /> Charles Thomson emigrated to America from his native Ireland in 1739. On recommendation of Benjamin Franklin he served as a tutor at the College of Pennsylvania later the University of Pennsylvania. He later left teaching for business in which he prospered. "Because of his reputation for fairness and integrity he was chosen by the Indians to keep their record of proceedings at the treaty of Easton 1757 and in the following year he was adopted into the Delaware tribe with a name meaning `man who tells the truth'" DAB. He was an early and ardent supporter of the Revolution and was unanimously elected Secretary to the Continental Congress serving in that post from 1774 to 1789. Thomson "was the very man in Philadelphia with whom John Adams busily probing the minds of all and sundry on the vital questions involved would wish to have as he did have 'much conversation.' 'This Charles Thomson' Adams wrote 'is the Sam Adams of Philadelphia the life of the cause of liberty they say.'" DAB. Thomson resigned his post when he was offered no part in Washington's inauguration ceremonies nor any post in the new administration. He devoted the next twenty years to his monumental translation.<br /> <br /> Jane Aitken continued her father Robert's business after his death in 1802. "She had in 1810 a printing house in Philadelphia. She obtained much reputation by the productions which issued from her press" Thomas. In addition to being one of the first American female printers Jane Aitken was also a bookseller bookbinder businesswoman and employer. The typeface Aitken used for the Thomson Bible was an attractive and utilitarian type developed in 1796 by two Scotsmen Binney and Ronaldson at their Philadelphia type foundry. The Thomson Bible is considered her greatest printing achievement and the first Bible printed by a woman in America.<br /> <br /> This set in a very unusual American full morocco gilt binding likely bound by Aitken's shop. See Spawn Willman and Carol Spawn "The Aitken Shop: Identification of an Eighteenth-Century Bindery and Its Tools" in The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America vol. 57 no. 4 1963 pp. 422-37. Darlow & Moule 1005; Herbert 1514; Rumball-Petre 184; O'Callaghan 1808.2; Wright p.113; Hills 153; Thomas History of Printing in America p.402 Printed by Jane Aitken unknown
185369294Philadelphia: Isaac Leeser 1853. BIBLE IN ENGLISH; LEESER Isaac. LEESER Isaac translator. The Twenty-Four Books of the Holy Scriptures. Carefully translated according to the Masoretic Text on the Basis of the English Version after the best Jewish Authorities; and supplied with short Explanatory Notes. By Isaac Leeser. Hebrew "For it shall not be forgotten out of the mouth of his seed." Dent. xxxi 21. Philadelphia: Isaac Leeser 1853.<br> <br> Full Description:<br> <br> BIBLE IN ENGLISH. LEESER Isaac translator. The Twenty-Four Books of the Holy Scriptures. Carefully translated according to the Masoretic Text on the Basis of the English Version after the best Jewish Authorities; and supplied with short Explanatory Notes. By Isaac Leeser. Hebrew "For it shall not be forgotten out of the mouth of his seed." Dent. xxxi 21. Philadelphia: Isaac Leeser 1853.<br> <br> First edition of the first complete translation of the Old Testament by a Jewish translator into English building upon Leeser's 1845 translation of the five books of the Pentateuch translation in 1845-1846. Folio 10 3/8 x 8 3/8 inches; 275 x 212 mm.<br> <br> Original full brown morocco. Boards ruled and elaborately stamped in gilt. Spine stamped and lettered in gilt. All edges marbled. Marbled endpapers. Binding with some restoration along joints and edges. A bit of foxing mainly to the preliminaries. Some occasional light dampstaining. Overall a very good copy.<br> <br> "Having published a five-volume Pentateuch-cum-haftarot lections from the Prophets translation in 1845-1846 as well as a complete vocalized and accentuated Hebrew Bible in 1848 the first such edition published in the U.S. he proceeded from April 1852 to September 1853 to extend his translation efforts to the entire Hebrew Bible. The result was his Twenty-Four Books of the Holy Scriptures the first translation of all of Tanakh into English by a Jew complete with short explanatory notes. Leeser explained in the preface to his magnum opus that he undertook the project in order to provide Anglophone Jewry with a vernacular version of the Bible "which has not been made by the authority of churches in which they can have no confidence" pp. iii-iv. The book achieved wide popularity among English-speaking Jews and even some Gentiles especially in America and went through multiple editions." Sotheby's<br> <br> "The translation of the Bible was Leeser's great literary achievement and represented many years of patient labor and devotion to a task which he considered sacred. Leeser was not fully equipped for this work for he was no specialist in Hebrew philology nor a master if Jewish learning in general and he was quite conscious of his shortcomings but he was inspired. He says in his preface: 'I thought in all due humility that I might safely go to task confidently relying upon that superior aid which is never withheld from the inquirer after truth.' He made good use of the various German translations by Jews of the collective commentary known as the Biur vol. III sec. 81 and of other Jewish exegetic works. As a result his translation though based in style upon the King James version can be considered an independent work for the changes he produced are numerous and great. His prime concern was to supply the traditional interpretation when necessary and the retention of the Jewish spirit at times even at the expense of beauty of style. The translation went through numerous editions and until the new Jewish Publication Society version was issued in 1917 it was the only source from which many Jews not conversant with Hebrew derived their knowledge of the Bible in accordance with Jewish tradition" Waxman History of Jewish Literature 1090.<br> <br> HBS 69294.<br> <br> $12500. [Isaac Leeser] unknown
1802373649Boston: Printed by Thomas Fleet 1802. The tenth American thumb Bible. Separate title pages to each work. With three wood or metal cuts in N.T. 1013-160; vi 107 2 ii-iv iv pp. 1 vols. Miniature 2-1/16 x 3-1/4 inches in 12s. Dappled tan pastepaper over wooden boards. Leaf A1 in OT supplied and remargined. The tenth American thumb Bible. Separate title pages to each work. With three wood or metal cuts in N.T. 1013-160; vi 107 2 ii-iv iv pp. 1 vols. Miniature 2-1/16 x 3-1/4 inches in 12s. A splendid copy of the miniature Bible printed by Thomas Fleet in 1801-2 the tenth American thumb Bible. The text is a paraphrase of the Old and New Testaments by John Taylor 1578-1653 known as the Water Poet; the earliest surviving edition of which was printed in London in 1614. In America five editions were printed in the 1760s and four more between 1786 and 1799. All are rare and survive in just a few copies. After about 1810 the number of thumb Bibles and the variousness of their titles and imprints increased markedly.<br /> <br /> The Fleet thumb Bible is two volumes bound as one each with a separate dated title page. Following the New Testament are Prayers for Morning and Prayers for Evening.<br /> <br /> There are four other recorded copies of this book: at the Morgan Library PML81221 lacking all half title and titles and other leaves; at AAS the Welch Stone copy lacking the half title and six pages of the Old Testament; at the Boston Public library rebound; and at the Lilly Library bibliographer Ruth Adomeit's copy in the original binding lacking the first leaf.<br /> <br /> A gorgeous copy in original binding. Shaw & Shoemaker 1383; Welch 1293.10; Adomeit A10 Printed by Thomas Fleet unknown
18146255Philadelphia: Printed by William Fry for Thomas Dobson 1814. First edition. <p>First edition of the first Hebrew Bible printed in America - this copy with the extremely rare inserted publisher's notice of February 1814 explaining the genesis of the edition a leaf that Goldman's bibliography of American Hebrew printing records in the Jewish Theological Seminary copy alone. Proposed in 1812 by Jonathan Horwitz an émigré newly arrived from Amsterdam with a font of Hebrew type the project passed early in 1813 to the publisher Thomas Dobson - already famous for the first American encyclopaedia - and the printer William Fry. The text reprints the great Amsterdam tradition of Athias Leusden and Van der Hooght whose 1705 edition was the received Hebrew text of the age printed here without vowel points and aimed at the Christian Hebraists of Harvard and Andover; American Jews continued to import pointed Bibles. It remained the only Hebrew Bible printed in America until Leeser's pointed edition of 1848. Bookseller's ticket of Talbot Watts New York dated March 1847.</p>. The Hebrew Bible Comes to America. <p>First edition of the first Hebrew Bible printed in America - the editio prima Americana of the sacred tongue of major importance in the field of American Judaica - this copy preserving the publisher's inserted notice of February 1814 recounting the genesis of the edition a leaf so rarely retained that Goldman's standard bibliography of American Hebrew printing records it in the Jewish Theological Seminary copy alone and omits it from the collation of the edition. Until these two octavo volumes left William Fry's Philadelphia press no complete biblical text in Hebrew had ever issued from an American press: congregations and colleges alike read from Bibles carried or ordered across the Atlantic. Their publication was the most ambitious Hebrew typesetting yet attempted in the United States and a measure of the standing Hebrew learning held in the early republic - a symbolic weight out of all proportion to the number of its readers. Abraham Karp surveying the Judaic treasures of the Library of Congress singled out the inserted notice as the key document of the edition's history found 'in some of the first copies of the first volume off the press'; the present set is one of the very few in which that first-state leaf escaped the binder's discard. Only one other copy described with the notice has been traced in auction records Philadelphia 2024.</p> <br /> <p>The notice itself dated February 1814 and printed on a single inserted leaf compresses the whole story of the enterprise into four paragraphs. In 1812 Jonathan Horwitz had proposed an edition of the Hebrew Bible 'the first proposal of the kind ever offered in the United States'; clergymen of standing endorsed the undertaking and subscriptions were gathered. Early in 1813 Horwitz transferred his rights and his subscriber list to Thomas Dobson who now reported the first volume published and the second well advanced. The publisher then turned his readers into proof-correctors: gentlemen of learning into whose hands the volume might come were entreated to note typographical errors and transmit their lists to Dobson in Philadelphia so that an accurate table of errata might be printed at the close of the work - a table which the collations of recorded copies suggest was never executed. A final line explains both the leaf's function and its disappearance: the title pages and preface would be furnished with the second volume. The earliest purchasers therefore received volume one as a bare text block this notice standing in for the missing preliminaries; when the second volume appeared with the title leaves and Van der Hooght's preface binders bound the proper preliminaries in and discarded the now-superfluous notice. The variable placement of those preliminaries among recorded copies - the four preface leaves stand at the front of the second volume in another documented set at the front of the first in the present one - is itself a fossil of this two-stage issue. The notice's survival here bound after the first title with the prefatory selections following marks the present set as one assembled from the first copies issued and fixes a terminus for its earliest American owner.</p> <br /> <p>Behind the notice lies a publishing race conducted in the newspapers of two cities. Jonathan Horwitz d. 1852 a Jewish émigré recently arrived from Amsterdam brought with him a font of Hebrew type and the conviction that the United States was ready for its own Hebrew Bible. He was nearly right and nearly first: the New York theological booksellers Whiting & Watson announced a rival Hebrew Bible under the patronage of the Theological Seminary at Andover; the missionary leaders John M. Mason and James McFarlane stood ready to enter the field; and in London Joseph Samuel C. F. Frey - the converted president of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews - had in 1812 already published the first volume of a vocalized Hebrew Bible for the English-speaking world with rumours that he would cross the Atlantic to distribute it. Horwitz counter-attacked in the New York Evening Post of 16 January 1813 declaring that Harvard College and the Andover Theological Institution patronised his edition and had subscribed for forty copies each. Within weeks however he chose security over glory: he sold his Hebrew type to the printer William Fry made over his publication rights and subscriber list to Dobson and enrolled in the medical department of the University of Pennsylvania taking his M.D. in 1815. He practised medicine for the rest of his life marrying into the family of Haym Salomon the Jewish financier of the Revolution; his son Phineas rose to head the United States Navy's Bureau of Medicine. The Whiting & Watson Bible never appeared.</p> <br /> <p>The men who carried the project to completion were two of the most substantial figures in the Philadelphia book trade. Thomas Dobson 1751-1823 Scottish-born and Philadelphia-established from 1785 had already accomplished the most audacious publishing feat of the young republic: Dobson's Encyclopaedia 1789-1798 the first encyclopaedia published in the United States eighteen quarto volumes re-edited from the third Encyclopaedia Britannica with George Washington among the subscribers. His shop at 41 South Second Street was known simply as the Stone House and the Bible's title page Latinises the address into the imprint: edita ex aedibus lapideis. William Fry a printer praised for the accuracy of his presswork - his former partnership of Fry & Kammerer had printed the elegant 1809 specimen of Binny & Ronaldson the first permanent type foundry in the United States - executed the Hebrew text with the font acquired from Horwitz. Horwitz's prospectus had promised a new pica Hebrew to be cast for the purpose at the Binny & Ronaldson foundry but the type Fry actually employed appears to have been the Amsterdam font Horwitz had carried across the Atlantic: the foundry's surviving papers record only the freight on a parcel of Hebrew type shipped into Philadelphia in 1813 and every contemporary account of the project has Horwitz selling his own font to Fry. The Hebrew of the first American Bible was thus fittingly Dutch metal - cast in the same typographic culture that had produced the very editions the text reproduces. The choice of so compact a programme - the bare consonantal text without the apparatus of points and accents - kept the undertaking within the powers of a shop that had never before set a Hebrew book and the result is remarkably clean: the printer allowed himself a single flourish closing the first volume with the note Placuit Typographo has Deo agere gratias in fine hujus Tomi ex Jes. 40:29 - it pleased the typographer to give thanks to God at the end of the volume in the words of Isaiah.</p> <br /> <p>The text the Philadelphians chose was the most authoritative available anywhere: the Amsterdam tradition running from Joseph Athias through Everardus van der Hooght. Athias c. 1635-1700 the great Sephardic printer of Amsterdam produced in 1659-61 the first Hebrew Bible with numbered verses its proofs read by Johannes Leusden professor of Hebrew at Utrecht; on its completion Athias was admitted to the Amsterdam printers' guild an unprecedented honour for a Jew and the improved second edition of 1667 won him a gold chain and medal from the States General of the Dutch Republic. Long regarded as the most accurate Hebrew text in print the Athias-Leusden Bible became the foundation of virtually all subsequent editions. Everardus van der Hooght 1642-1716 a Dutch Reformed minister - the V.D.M. of the title page - corrected it once more for his Amsterdam and Utrecht edition of 1705 working not from manuscripts but from the printed tradition checked against the Masorah and prized above all for the exceptional clarity of its type. Van der Hooght's became the de facto received text of the Hebrew Bible for a century and a half: Houbigant Kennicott Hahn and Letteris all took it as their base as did the Bible Society editions of the nineteenth century. The 1814 Philadelphia edition declares this lineage on its title page and retains the essentials of Van der Hooght's apparatus in selection: four preliminary leaves headed Everardi van der Hooght ex praefatione selectae in hac editione retentae the Latin marginal annotations keyed to the text and the Masoretic verse-count summaries at the close of each biblical book with their mnemonic signs expounded in Latin notes.</p> <br /> <p>The two volumes carry the traditional tripartite Bible whole. The retained preface opens by expounding the division the volumes follow: the Torah or Law in its five books; the Prophets former and latter from Joshua to the Twelve; and the Hagiographa Psalms to Chronicles with the five scrolls read publicly at the festivals of the synagogue year. Divisional titles in Hebrew and Latin mark the great sections - Prophetae Posteriores announces Isaiah Jeremiah Ezekiel and the Twelve on a separate leaf - and each book runs under bilingual headlines the chapters numbered in roman and in Hebrew letters the text set in single column with Van der Hooght's Latin apparatus in the margins. At the end of each book the Masoretic colophons are reproduced and explicated: the close of Kings gives the count of 1534 verses with its mnemonic the close of Chronicles - and of the whole Bible - the count of 1656 each Hebrew letter-numeral resolved into figures in the Latin notes. These terminal apparatus pages easy to mistake for printer's ornament are in fact the working machinery of textual integrity that the Masoretes had built and Van der Hooght transmitted: a self-auditing text carried intact into the New World.</p> <br /> <p>One deliberate omission defined the edition's audience and its fate. As the title page announces the text is printed sine punctis Masorethicis - without the vowel points and cantillation marks of the Masoretic apparatus. Pointed Hebrew composition in which every consonant carries superimposed and subjacent sorts was beyond the capacity and the budget of the project; the unpointed text halved the difficulty of the typesetting at the cost of presupposing readers who could vocalise Hebrew for themselves - for the points are not ornament but the entire vocalisation tradition of the text fixed by the Masoretes of Tiberias and a bare consonantal page demands that the reader supply from memory what the apparatus would otherwise dictate. The practical consequence was that the first American Hebrew Bible was of limited use to American Jews: a text without points cannot serve the synagogue lectern or the elementary schoolroom and Jewish communities continued to import pointed Bibles from Europe. The book was aimed instead at the Gentile scholars ministers and seminarians whose institutions had subscribed for it - the constituency of the great religious revival then transforming American Protestantism which had made the recovery of the biblical languages an urgent devotional project. The edition thus occupies a curious position in Jewish book history: a Hebrew Bible produced in a land of Jewish refuge initiated by a Jewish immigrant and yet calculated for Christian use - a precise mirror of the state of Hebrew learning in the early republic.</p> <br /> <p>American Hebraism had deep roots but before 1814 almost no Hebrew press to show for it. Judah Monis's Grammar of the Hebrew Tongue Boston 1735 the first book printed in America with substantial Hebrew text had required type procured from London; Monis taught Hebrew at Harvard for nearly forty years and his grammar served as the College's required text. Hebrew figured in commencement exercises at Harvard Yale and Columbia; Ezra Stiles president of Yale made it a personal devotion. The founding of the Theological Seminary at Andover in 1808 institutionalised the revival of biblical philology and in 1813 the year Horwitz surrendered his project Andover's Moses Stuart published the first Hebrew grammar of the independent United States - finding no compositor equal to the task he set much of the Hebrew himself. A legend that the revolutionary generation had considered replacing English with Hebrew as the national language - traced by Shalom Goldman to a passing remark of the Marquis de Chastellux inflated by mocking British reviewers - has no documentary basis but its long circulation testifies to the symbolic standing the sacred tongue enjoyed in a republic that read itself as a new Israel. It was this climate - colleges teaching Hebrew seminaries multiplying a reading clergy hungry for the text in its original - that made a two-volume Hebrew Bible a plausible commercial venture in a country of perhaps three thousand Jews.</p> <br /> <p>Contemporary reception bore out both the promise and the irony. Karp observed that the appearance of a Hebrew work bearing the approbation of leading Christian clergymen and leading Jews alike marked the beginning of a friendlier intellectual discourse between the two communities - a discourse conducted warily since several of the divines most active in promoting Hebrew study were also active missionaries and Frey's conversionist society stood behind the rival London Bible. The standing of the edition among Jewish readers is caught a generation later in the letter of Rabbi Sabato Morais of Philadelphia printed by John Wright in Early Bibles of America: the edition was good the annotations helpful and copious. The endorsement carries its own quiet symmetry - Morais Leeser's successor at Mikveh Israel was a founder of the Jewish Theological Seminary the institution in whose library the one leaf-bearing copy recorded by Goldman now rests. The political setting sharpens the point: at the time of printing fewer than half of the original states extended full political equality to their Jewish citizens. The first Hebrew Bible printed in America thus appeared into a republic that honoured the language of Israel while still hedging the rights of Israelites - and the book itself passing between Jewish projector and Gentile publisher between seminary subscribers and synagogue importers embodies that unresolved moment.</p> <br /> <p>The edition kept its primacy for a generation. No second printing followed; Fry's Hebrew font surfaced only in smaller Philadelphia work; and the next complete Hebrew Bible printed in America - the first with vowel points - came only in 1848 when Isaac Leeser hazzan of Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia and the dominant figure of antebellum American Jewish letters produced his pointed Biblia Hebraica with the Episcopalian Hebraist Joseph Jaquett its Latin introduction dated September of that year. For thirty-four years the Dobson-Fry edition stood alone the only Hebrew Bible printed in America; every American who studied the Scriptures in their original from an American-printed book studied it from these sheets. Bibliographically the edition is anchored in every standard apparatus of the field - Rosenbach's pioneering American Jewish Bibliography Singerman's Judaica Americana Goldman's Hebrew Printing in America Darlow & Moule's catalogue of printed Scripture - and it is one of the few American books of its decade to have earned a separate bibliographical study Vaxer's account in the Journal of Jewish Bibliography for 1940.</p> <br /> <p>Sets of the Bible itself though held by the major Judaica collections - the Library of Congress and the Jewish Theological Seminary among them - appear on the market only at intervals: a recent cataloguer could count just five sets at auction in the preceding decade. The February 1814 notice is of another order of rarity altogether. The leaf was ephemeral by design superseded by the very preliminaries it promised and the bibliographers' collations treat it as a supernumerary survival rather than a constituent of the edition: Goldman's census-level note - locating the leaf in the Jewish Theological Seminary's Karp copy alone among the copies he recorded - remains the standard statement of its scarcity and the single auction copy described with the notice together with the present set brings the number of traceable examples to a small handful. For a collector of American Judaica the distinction is decisive: with the notice the set is not merely the first Hebrew Bible printed in America but a first-state copy carrying the edition's own birth certificate - the document from which every account of the book's genesis from Wright in 1894 to Karp in 1991 ultimately derives.</p> <br /> <p>An early trace of the set's American life survives on the front pastedown of the first volume: the printed ticket of Talbot Watts 'The Cheapest Store in the World' for books prints and oil paintings at 102 Nassau Street New York dated March 1847. Doggett's city directory for 1846-47 lists Watts as an agent for books and paintings at that address in the heart of the Nassau Street quarter that was already New York's second-hand book row; his ticket places the volumes in the New York trade barely a generation after publication circulating among the city's collectors and curiosity buyers while Leeser's pointed Bible was still in preparation.</p> <br /> <p>The two volumes close a circle in the history of the Hebrew book: a text perfected in seventeenth-century Amsterdam by Athias and Van der Hooght carried across the Atlantic in a font of type by an Amsterdam Jew and reborn in Philadelphia as the young republic's first Scripture printed in the original tongue. The line they opened runs forward through Leeser's pointed Biblia Hebraica of 1848 to the whole subsequent tradition of American Jewish Bible publishing and backward to Monis's lonely Harvard grammar of 1735 - the two poles between which this edition stands as the decisive event. Few books document so compactly the moment the Hebrew Bible came to America: the race of projectors fought out in the newspapers the immigrant's font of Dutch type the Stone House imprint rendered into Latin and in the copies issued first a printed leaf asking the learned gentlemen of a young republic to help perfect the word.</p> <br /> <br /> References:<br /> Goldman Hebrew Printing in America 4 - Rosenbach An American Jewish Bibliography 171 - Singerman Judaica Americana 236 - Darlow & Moule 5168a - Shaw & Shoemaker 30857 - O'Callaghan American Bibles 1814:8 - Wright Early Bibles of America 3rd ed. 1894 pp. 122-24 - Wolf & Whiteman The History of the Jews of Philadelphia p. 306 - M. Vaxer 'The First Hebrew Bible Printed in America' Journal of Jewish Bibliography II 1940 pp. 20-26 - A.J. Karp From the Ends of the Earth: Judaic Treasures of the Library of Congress Washington 1991 pp. 291-92 - S. Goldman God's Sacred Tongue: Hebrew and the American Imagination Chapel Hill 2004 - R.D. Arner Dobson's Encyclopaedia Philadelphia 1991.<br /> <br/> <br/> <p>Two vols. 8vo 221 × 139 mm ff. 6 296; 2 312 titles to both volumes dated 1814; the first volume with the inserted publisher's notice dated February 1814 and the four leaves of selections from Van der Hooght's Latin preface bound after the title. Contemporary American half calf over marbled boards smooth spines ruled in gilt with black lettering-pieces 'Biblia Hebraica' 'Tom. I'/'Tom. II'; binding moderately rubbed with loss of leather at the corners and some chipping at the spine ends; scattered foxing and some marginal staining the text generally clean. Printed ticket of Talbot Watts bookseller 102 Nassau Street New York dated March 1847 on the front pastedown of vol. I. Preserved in a custom cloth case with gilt-lettered morocco back.</p> . Printed by William Fry for Thomas Dobson unknown
1814372931Philadelphia: Cura et Impensis Thomae Dobson edita ex aedibus Lapideis. Typis Gulielmi Fry 1814. First American edition. Text in Hebrew with notes in Latin. 6 296; 2 312 leaves. Half titles present in each volume. Uncut. 2 vols. 8vo. Original blue paper boards rebacked with plain paper. Provenance: Hugh Blair Grigsby booklabels. In a blue cloth folding box. First American edition. Text in Hebrew with notes in Latin. 6 296; 2 312 leaves. Half titles present in each volume. Uncut. 2 vols. 8vo. The first complete Hebrew Bible printed in America. Hebrew type was first used in the North American colonies in the Bay Psalm Book printed in 1640 in Cambridge. Over the next ninety-five years Hebrew type appeared in a handful of American imprints usually in brief examples of single words or short sentences. Paucity of appropriate type would continue to be a problem over the years that followed. The first Jewish Psalter was finally published in 1809 followed by this complete Bible five years later. "In 1812 Mr. Horwitz had proposed the publication of this edition of the Hebrew Bible the first proposal of the kind in the United States; early in 1813 be transferred his right and list of subscribers to Mr. Thos. Dobson who published soon afterwards the 1st volume" O'Callaghan. The title page indicates that this work is a reprinting of the second edition of the Joseph Athias Bible edited by Leusden with Latin notes by Everardo Van der Hought and that the Hebrew is printed without vowels. An important piece of American printing and of Jewish Americana. Darlow and Moule 5168a; Goldman 4; Rosenbach 171; Shaw and Shoemaker 30857; Singerman 236; M. Vaxer "The First Hebrew Bible Printed in America" Journal of Jewish Bib. 1940 vol. 2 pp. 20-26 Cura et Impensis Thomae Dobson edita ex aedibus Lapideis. Typis Gulielmi Fry unknown
186249952Glasgow Edinburgh and London: William Mackenzie 1862. Deluxe Edition. Two volumes folio 450 x 330 mm published between 1862 and 1863. 16 1344pp. 57 unnumbered leaves of albumin prints 230 x 160mm mounted on card stock. Crimson morocco over wooden boards elaborately tooled in gilt and blind; edges mounted in brass double brass clasps with thistle motif; covers with a broad blind-stamped border around a recessed central panel with the crowned cipher of Queen Victoria in gilt; gilt tooled spine with 5 raised bands; a.e.g. marbled endleaves with gilt dentelles. Covers with some mild traces of use; single crease in each marbled endleaf partially detached in second volume; occasional light to moderate foxing mostly confined to the plate mounts; albumin prints in fine condition often with foxing extending about 5mm from the edges into the mount. Overall a very good set with a fine series of photographs notable for their technical achievment.<br /> <br /> Deluxe edition one of 170 copies complete with all 57 albumen prints. Produced for the 1862 International Exhibition and dedicated to Queen Victoria then recently in mourning for the death of Prince Albert this work appeared at a time when photography though still a laborious and expensive process was just beginning to become a popular activity. Victoria herself was an amateur photographer and "the royal couple had been enthusiastic supporters of photography in England from the beginning; in 1853 they became founding patrons of the Photographic Society Club" K. Fiedorek. Francis Frith 1822-1898 the devout Quaker whose photographic images grace the present work was one of the best-known photographers to work in the Near East and the most commercially successful photographer of the nineteenth century. Finding his elementary studies tedious Frith left school at the age of ten apprenticed with a grocer and eventually started his own business. He later went into printing sold the grocery business to a competitor at a substantial profit and went on to devote himself to photography. "The growing Victorian interest in the East and its exotic and historic attractions caught the attention of this astute businessman" Perez. Between 1856 and 1860 Frith made three photographic expeditions to Egypt Ethiopia Sinai and the Levant accompanied by the engineer Francis Herbert Wenham who provided technical assistance in mechanics and optics. While Perez notes that Frith's "approach was always a strictly commercial one and his concern was to make truthful and accurate views of the area" he readily concedes that "the technical quality of Frith's photographs is superior." Frith employed the new wet collodion process in which glass plate negatives were sensitized exposed and developed while still wet. While technically demanding the process yielded rich detail and broad tones. "Frith's were the first original wet-plate photographs of Jerusalem and the Holy Land to reach a wide English-speaking audience and his pictures of the small Palestinian towns were most likely the first published anywhere" Nir p.66.<br /> <br /> Perhaps the most novel aspect of this celebrated edition of the Bible and certainly a harbinger of things to come was the way in which the photographer "presented the radical possibility of seeing photographs of the biblical sites alongside related verses of scripture. he sought to defend and promote his faith by conscripting the veracity of science and materialism to his cause and considered photography to be the most effective medium for his campaign" Foster et al. This vision is manifest even in such details as the re-captioning of prints previously offered for sale so that the new descriptions would more clearly reference the King James text. It should be noted that while the printing was still done by hand this was one of the earliest books for which machinery was used for composing. Original publisher's price = 50 guineas. Another version of this work was published at London in 1860-1862 by Eyre & Spottiswoode; sometimes confused with the present work it was issued in 20 parts each containing a single photographic print by Frith.<br /> <br /> K. Fiedorek A Photographic Bible Fit for a Queen NYPL Blog 2014. Foster Heiting and Stuhlman Imagining Paradise pp. 68-69. Gernsheim Incunabula of British Photographic Literature 1839-1875 p.36 no.184. Herbert The English Bible 1940 1217. Y. Nir The Bible and the Image The History of Photography in the Holy Land 1939-1899 esp. chap. 3: "Early Traveling Landscape Photographers". N. Perez Focus East: Early Photography in the Near East 1838-1885 pp.163-165. William Mackenzie unknown
