Buff; or, a Dissertation on Nakedness: A Parody on Paine's Rights of Man.

£5,000 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

Rare. OCLC records BL and National Library of Scotland (microfilm); Huntington , UC-Berkeley and American Philosophical Society. The last copy recorded on Rare Book Hub was asold t Anderson Galleries in New York in 1922 (“Author’s presentation copy” - but annoyingly it did not name the anonymous author.) “Is there one, but what is worse, much more destructive to the rights of and liberties of man than the coat”: a satirical parody of Paine’s Rights of Man , in which the author uses Paine’s own words - with italicised new insertions - to alter his revolutionary arguments into a call for public nakedness. A very nice copy bound in an anti-Paine related and pro-slavery contemporary pamphlet volume. In the introduction the anonymous author sets out the simple but amusingly effective way in which Paine’s own writing is used against him: “Mr Paine’s discussion of the Rights of Man, affords all that is necessary to a discussion of Nakedness: slight alterations fit it for the latter, as well as it is now fitted for the former; and it would require very little literary legerdemain to fit it for any subject.” (p.3) The work then uses excerpts from Paine’s actual text mixed with short passages in italics (by the anonymous author) which turns the text into an argument for nakedness. The text begins: “So deeply rooted in the practice of covering human nakedness, is the old world, and so effectually has the tyranny and the antiquity of habit established itself over the mind, that we know n

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