Earnest Advice,

Book Description

London: Sold by Dodsley, in Pall-mall, 1778. Particularly to Persons who live in habitual Neglect of Our Lord’s Supper, considered as a commemorative Sacrifice. . . . In Forty-Nine Letters. xiv, 240pp., 12mo. Engraved frontispiece by Major after Cypriani; a few stains. Original calf, bound for Hanway by his second binder (see below), the monogram “I.H.S.” within a diamond on the front cover and a winged hourglass on the lower, gilt floral cornerpieces, and the spine gilt with an all-over chequered pattern and red morocco label; rubbed with the gilt somewhat faded in places, one small abrasion on upper cover. Contemporary ownership inscription “Jn Fox” on title. First edition, one of Hanway’s rarest tracts, partly drawn from Hanway’s other writings including Virtue in Humble Life.The binding shares some tools with the example illustrated in Nixon’s Five Centuries of English Bookbinding, no. 78. For a much closer relation, however, see Maggs Bros. Catalogue 1212, Bookbinding in the British Isles, 1996, no. 155, where the spine tooling is almost identical, and the floral tools here seen as cornerpieces are used as a border. ESTC on-line locates only six copies of this title, which was never reprinted, at BL, Cambridge, Columbia, Harvard, McMaster, and Yale. ESTC reports the pagination as “[2], v, [1], v-xiv, 240p.” In the present copy, unsophisticated in its original binding, the title leaf is followed by pp. iii-iv, “The Frontispiece,” v-ix, “To the Countess Spencer,” [x] blank, and xi-xiv, “Contents.” A second series of roman numerals follows with p. [i]-x, “Introduction,” which then continues directly into arabic p. 11, “Letter I” and so on to p. 240. The ESTC pagination is reported by Yale; I cannot verify the pagination of the British Library and Cambridge copies. Columbia, Harvard, and McMaster all report the same pagination as the copy here offered.

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