Читать книгу The Isle Of Pines (1668) and An Essay in Bibliography by Worthington Chauncey Ford - Henry Neville - Страница 8

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One afternoon, when I had finished my work and the others had left, I picked up the catalogue of the Dowse Library and began idly to turn over its leaves. Incidentally, that catalogue is characteristic of the older methods of the Society. As is known to the elect, no book in the Dowse Library can ever leave the room in which it now rests, and of the catalogue twenty-five copies were printed and never circulated. If the library had been left in the Dowse house in Cambridgeport, its existence and contents could not have been more successfully hidden from the world. While reading the titles in a very casual way, my eye was caught by one which gave me a start. It read:

Sloetten (Cornelius van). The Isle of Pines; or a Late Discovery of a Fourth Island in Terra Australis Incognita. London, printed by G. S. for Allen Banks, 1668. With a New and Further Discovery of the Isle of Pines, 1668; and a duplicate of the Isle of Pines. 1 vol. small 4to, calf supr., gilt leaves. A most interesting, rare, and valuable work.

Even against the Editor of the Society the Dowse books are kept behind lock and key, though he is not under more than ordinary suspicion. So I was obliged to wait till the next day before my curiosity could be satisfied. I then found a thin volume, less than one-third of an inch in thickness, containing two copies of this very tract which the auction expert had identified as an issue of the "Isle of Pines" by Green, and a London issue of a second part of the "Isle of Pines," with the name of Cornelius Van Sloetten, as author. For more than fifty years this little volume had reposed in this well-known yet almost forgotten library, and no one had suspected or questioned the nature of its contents.

For full fifty years it had been in the care and at the call of Dr. Samuel A. Green, who claimed to be an expert on New England imprints of the seventeenth century, and one of the great wishes of whose life had been to establish his descent from this very printer, Samuel Green. Two copies within the same covers, of a tract long sought and of which only a single example had come to light in two centuries and a half—was not that alone something of a bibliographical coup?

I read two of the pieces—one of the Green issues and the second part as printed in England—making a few notes for future use. On returning to the matter some weeks later I found to my annoyance that every reference to the Green tract but one was wrong as to the page. Cold, haste, or weariness will account for a single or possibly two errors of reference, but to have a whole series—except one—go wrong pointed to failing eyes or mind. Very much put out, I read the tract a second time and corrected the page references, carefully checking up the result. Some days after I again took up the matter, and in verifying my first quotation found that I had again put down the wrong page number, and was surprised to find that the correct page was the one I had first given. This proved to be the case in all the references—except one. A book which could thus change its page numbering from week to week was bewitched—or I was careless. It occurred to me to compare the two copies of the tract as published by Green. The title-pages were exactly alike—not differing by so much as a fly speck, but one copy contained ten pages of text and the other only nine.

More than that, the general style and the types were quite different One was printed in a well-known broad but somewhat used type, such as could be seen in Green's printing, and the other in a finer font with much italic. There was no possibility of confusing the two issues. Only one conclusion was possible. I had in this volume the publication by Green, and the original issue by Marmaduke Johnson, but with Green's title-page. So for we seem to rest upon solid ground. It may be surmised that Green set up his "Isle of Pines" in rivalry to Johnson, but did not incur the discipline of the authorities; or that he had set it up and also took over Johnson's edition, using his own title-page; and in either case it is possible that a simple subterfuge, the imprint, "by S. G. for Allen Banks and Charles Harper," a London combination of publishers, caused the tract to escape the attention of the examining local censors. Here was another step in developing the history of this tract—the discovery of one of Johnson's issues, except for the title-page. So far as the American connection is concerned, it only remains to discover a Johnson issue with a Johnson title-page, for in his apology and submission to the General Court he states that he had "affixed" his name to the pamphlet.