Apr 27, 2017 - Sale 2444

Sale 2444 - Lot 69

Price Realized: $ 3,500
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500
(BIBLE IN ENGLISH--PSALMS.) Minter, Jeremiah. The Psalms of David, Imitated in the Language of the New Testament, for the Use of all Christians. 374, [1] pages. 18mo, contemporary calf, front board detached, worn; moderate foxing, 4 leaves coming detached and slightly worn; Landers family register through 1838 on rear flyleaf and rear endpapers, with related slips laid in. Baltimore, MD, 1810
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Minter explains in his preface that his project was to "put the Psalms of David into singing measures, and conform the sentiment with the Christian dispensation." He acknowledges the similar efforts by Isaac Watts and other English authors, but notes that "there has been no American production of the kind yet." He emphasizes that "my psalms are all original or new; not a stanza or verse is borrowed," and defends his work against "all its enemies and mine, who with lies would, if they could, destroy both it and me."
Minter was a controversial figure in his day. He had been an itinerant Methodist preacher, but was expelled after having himself surgically castrated based on his reading of the Bible--a decision he described in his 1817 memoir, "Brief Account of the Religious Experience." Only one other copy of his pioneering Psalms translation is traced on OCLC, an incomplete copy at the Princeton Theological Seminary lacking the final index leaf and the errata leaf. Not in Shaw & Shoemaker, and none others traced at auction--this may be the only extant complete copy.