[Rarebooks] fa: ELEGY ON THE DEATH OF ROBERT BOYLE in the ATHENIAN MERCURY 1692

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, auction ending Sunday, April 22. More details and images can be found at the URL below or by searching under the seller name arch_in_la.

http://tinyurl.com/86sq6yf

Thanks,
Ardwight Chamberlain
L.A.


The Athenian Mercury: Saturday, February 6, 1692. Vol. 6, Numb. 2. London: Printed for John Dunton at the Raven in the Poultrey, 1692. One sheet, folio (33 x 20 cm.; 13 x 8 in.), printed on both sides.

An issue of this popular seventeenth-century newspaper devoted almost entirely to a lengthy "Pindarick" elegy to Robert Boyle, the great chemist, physicist, inventor and founding member of the Royal Society, who had died a month before. Light toning and offsetting, a few small holes to the extreme left margin. Very uncommon.

The best-known and longest-lived of all seventeenth-century literary periodicals, The Athenian Mercury was the first advice column and the first newspaper to use the question-and-answer format. A widely-read staple of the coffee houses, it is also generally considered the first major popular periodical in England as well as the first miscellaneous periodical, and the first to appeal to both men and women. Published from 1691-1697 by the eccentric pamphleteer and prolific publisher John Dunton, the Athenian Mercury took its name from Acts 17:21 ("For all the Athenians and strangers which were there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new thing"). Over the course of its 580 numbers, it answered nearly 6000 questions, both weighty and frivolous, on a dizzying array of topics, including theology, philosophy, politics, health, natural history, science, literature, courtship and marriage, sex, etiquette, etc., etc.