The Essence of the Douglas Cause.

£1,250 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

Not in ESTC. Pottle 20. First published by Wilkie in the same year, although the Observations are advertised on the title-page they were removed shortly after publication by Boswell (Pottle only knew of the Harvard copy that preserved them). A second issue of this pirated edition was printed in 1769 (see Pottle). “The book is practically a page for page reprint of the first edition but the division of words and lines is not identical. There are also changes in spelling and punctuation. The printing is very poorly done and swarms with broken letters and typographical errors, the most noticeable of which are the frequent substitutions of ‘u’ for ‘n’ and ‘n’ for ‘u’: iun-keeper (p.24, 3rd line from bottom); pomponsy (p. 25, l.4 from bottom); Flnratl (p.27, l.8); Inspecteur (p28, l. 12) etc. The presence of the blank leaf at the end following a blank page shows that this edition never really contained the Observations mentioned on the title-page at all, but that the printer set it up from a copy of the first edition from which the Observations had been removed, and had not sense enough to alter the title-page accordingly.” (Pottle, p.42) One of the most immediately noticeable differences is the dropped “r” in “Church” in the imprint. Pottle notes that there is a copy of this edition in the Bodleian Library but that it lacks the final blank leaf (which is present here). “In spite of the imprint, everything points to the fact that this was a pirated edition, probably made by some S

• Year: 1767

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