Aristotle's Complete Master-Piece. Displaying the Secrets of Nature in the Generation of Man. To which is added The Family Physician ... A New Edition

London [but New England]: Printed for the Booksellers, 1802. Woodcut illustrations. 72pp. 1 vols. 12mo. Contempoary sheep backed blue paper covered scaleboard, printer's waste from an 1808 Maine almanac mounted onto the endpapers. Woodcut illustrations. 72pp. 1 vols. 12mo. An early American edition with false London imprint of this popular sex manual and midwifery book, first published in England in 1684. "Aristotle's Masterpiece was not written by Aristotle the ancient Greek philosopher; it was assembled from a number of popular medical works by an unknown hack writer. It is a bizarre assortment of superstition, folklore, and sex facts and fancies, all mixed in with the sort of common-sense medical advice that had been passed down by midwives for centuries. The text changed very little over the years, but it was often rearranged, as historian Mary Fissell has noted, like a reshuffled deck of cards. Most editions had the same crude woodcut illustrations of a child in the womb and of a few monstrous births ... The frontispiece usually showed the philosopher in his study contemplating a more or less unclothed woman. This was one of very few erotic images available to the common reader, and this, combined with an unusually frank discussion of human reproduction, made Aristotle's Masterpiece a dirty book, indeed the dirty book of the early modern period. It was sold furtively by country peddlers and in general stores and taverns; regular booksellers seldom advertised it, though they usually had it under the counter" (https://www.librarycompany.org/treasures/ad7.htm).

The earliest American edition has not been definitively determined, with a number of false imprints or editions without publisher identification potentially being American productions; the earliest known American edition was published in Boston by Zechariah Fowle in 1766 with a false London imprint (ESTC W6206).