Mar 10, 2020 - Sale 2533

Sale 2533 - Lot 21

Price Realized: $ 3,500
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000
THE BAY PSALM BOOK, SCARCE VARIANT (BIBLE IN ENGLISH--PSALMS.) The Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs of the Old and New-Testament. [2], 346 pages. 12mo, contemporary calf, worn, crude repairs to backstrip; lacking free endpapers and 8 internal leaves, some other leaves coming loose, moderate dampstaining and wear to contents without loss of text. Boston: S. Kneeland & T. Green for N. Proctor in Fish Street, 1737
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Additional Details

24th edition of the Bay Psalm Book. Not all of those editions were printed in America, though the 1640 first edition was the first book printed in North America. ESTC and Evans 4115 show no variant printings of this edition, listing the imprint as "Printed by S. Kneeland & T. Green for the Booksellers"; they call for 12 additional plates of music. Britton's American Sacred Music Imprints reports single surviving copies of two other variants, one printed for S. Eliot and one for A. Butler (51A and 51B) rather than for "the Booksellers." Neither of those copies has the music plates, nor does this present previously unidentified "for N. Proctor" variant. It seems likely that these variants were issued without the music. We know of only one other surviving example with this N. Proctor imprint, in the Michael Zinman collection at the Library Company of Philadelphia.