Marche

1835 · 5845 — C. Van Benthuysen; George H. Evans; 1835 1840 1841 1852. First Edition. Hardcover. Very good. 5 vols bound into contemporary cloth 7.25 x 4.63 inches frontispiece 202; 2; vii-viii ix-xxv 1; 4; frontispiece 4 126; 122; 74 pages. Excised leaf of an advertisement also laid in. First American editions of the Bible of Nature and of the Opus Maximum. Walking Stewart articulated a materialist philosophy of Nature which combined elements of pantheism with yogic notions of a single indissoluble consciousness. These early American imprints must have been read by the New England transcendentalists but I don't recall seeing Stewart discussed in the major biographies of Emerson or Thoreau. In any event the similarity is striking for example to Thoreau's Walking. The two volumes here of The Bible of Nature were published together by a consortium of free thought and radical publishers including expatriate English free thought emigrants Gilbert Vale and George Evans and by J. P. Mendum; the second volume as collected here appears either to be fragmentary or published solely as an introduction to stereotype editions of the Evans editions of Moral State of Nations and the Revelation of Nature. Something of a bibliographical tangle given that the stereotype plates were evidently available free to the asking for American radical publishers of the period and completeness of the second part of the Bible of Nature is unclear and may have been included here simply as a sort of table of contents to the volumes that here follow; whether this sammelband is as published and sold by the radical reformer George Henry Evans or had collected by an early reader is unclear. The New-York edition of Opus Maxium not located in OCLC. A nice copy with minimal wear some foxing and light staining; but still very good -- entirely and pleasantly readable throughout. Scarce. <br/><br/> C. Van Benthuysen; George H. Evans; hardcover