The Secretary in Fashion:

£2,800 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

Wing L461 (British Library, Bodley; Folger, University of Illinois, Yale; Monash University). Pasted to the inside of the rear cover is a contemporary printed advertisement slip with two columns of “Books printed or sold by William Leak, at the Crown in Fleetstreet, between the two Temple-Gates. ” A popular and important letter writing manual which includes numerous template letters covering all aspects of daily life. Owned and used by an Italian visitor to London in the 17th century. Jean Puget de La Serre (1600-65) was librarian to Gaston, Duc d’Orléans, and Historiographer of France. Of his many books, the unauthorised La Secrétaire de la Cour (1623) revised by La Serre (he complained in the preface that there had been 30 unauthorised editions) and published as La Secrétaire à la mode (1625), with later supplements, was the most popular, both in French and in the otherwise unknown John Massinger’s English translation of which there were six editions from 1640 to 1683. It was also translated into Dutch and Danish and an Italian translation by Girolamo Brusoni was published at Venice in 1661. The text, however, had a much longer life with the sample letters recurring as the base of numerous editions of similar books on courtesy writing through the 17th and 18th Centuries. The 1640 first edition of Massinger’s English translation comprised some of the prefatory matter and only the first two parts, comprising [38], 85 pages, as found in this 1658 edition with Part 1 comprised

• Year: 1658

Found via Rare Books Intel, a search across rare-book dealers, auction houses and marketplaces worldwide.