Apr 16, 2019 - Sale 2505

Sale 2505 - Lot 91

Price Realized: $ 4,000
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 4,000 - $ 6,000
(EARLY AMERICAN IMPRINT.) [Church, Thomas.] [Entertaining Passages Relating to Philip's War.] [2 of 4], 120 pages. 4to, original calf, quite worn, both boards broken with leather intact; lacking free endpapers, lacking the title page, first 2 text leaves quite defective with loss of most text, lacking leaves D2-3, final leaf defective with loss of perhaps 5% of text, moderate dampstaining and finger-spoiling, general edge wear and several closed tears; early owners' inscriptions on pastedowns. [Boston: B. Green, 1716]
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first edition of a popular and oft-reprinted narrative of King Philip's War, the bloody conflict between New England colonists and American Indians led by Metacomet of the Wampanoags. It also includes accounts of raiding parties against the Abenaki of Maine in the later King William's and Queen Anne's Wars from 1689 to 1704. It was based on the notes of Captain Benjamin Church (1639-1718), one of the key participants in these events, and compiled by his son; Captain Church read and approved the final draft.
"The reader seems to be a listener, and to be sitting by the side of this scarred and ancient paladin of the New England bush-whackers, and to hear his very talk, as he narrates, frankly, vividly, and always with a strong man's modesty, the deeds that once saved every New England man's door-post from being bespattered with the blood of his own wife and children"--Tyler, History of American Literature, page II:141. Church 862; Evans 1800; Howes C405 ("dd"--"superlatively rare . . . almost unobtainable"); Sabin 12996 ("one of the rarest books of its class").