(MASSACHUSETTS) Mather Cotton The Wonders of the Invisible W

Sale 2473 - Lot 138

Price Realized: $ 4,750

?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price

Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 4,000

AN UNIDENTIFIED EARLY ISSUE (MASSACHUSETTS.) Mather, Cotton. The Wonders of the Invisible World: Being an Account of the Tryals of Several Witches, Lately Executed in New-England. 16, 16, 33-80, 41-56, 89-96 [of 98] pages. 4to, later polished calf gilt, moderate wear; lacking the half-title, the title page, the final text leaf, and the ad leaf, with 6 leaves of 19th-century notes and transcriptions of missing sections bound in, leaf A1 defective with a small portion of text supplied in manuscript, a few marginal repairs, slight text loss to last 2 surviving leaves, minor foxing. London: John Dunton, 1693

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Additional Details

first london edition of Cotton Mather's defense of the Salem Witch Trials, in which he played a major role. The London publisher, apparently rushing to get the book to market, apparently broke up a copy of the Boston printing and contracted it out to two different printers, which helps to explain the erratic pagination.
This copy appears to be a previously unidentified first issue of the London first edition. Pages 50 and 51 in the second section are a completely different setting of type from the copy held at the British Library. The present copy has a 5-line errata on page 51 which was copied over verbatim from the Boston edition--it does not refer to passages in the London printing. The British Library copy replaces this errata with a 9-line statement headed "Matter Omitted in the Trials," resetting the surrounding passages to accommodate the change. Church 734; Howes M399 ("c"); Sabin 46604.