[Rarebooks] fa: ATHENIAN GAZETTE (Athenian Mercury) - VOL. 1, NO. 1 - 1691

[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 Gazette, Resolving Weekly all the most Nice and Curious Questions Propos'd by the Ingenious. Numb. 1. Tuesday, March, 17th. 1690 [i.e. 1691, New Calendar]. [London: 1691]. One sheet, folio (32.5 x 19.5 cm.; 12 3/4 x 7 3/4 in.), printed on both sides.

The first issue of the first advice column ever printed and the first newspaper to use the question-and-answer format. This widely-read staple of the coffee houses 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. Furthermore, this premiere number has the added distinction of being the first, last, and only one to bear the name Athenian Gazette. The official government-issued London Gazette having objected to this undignified misappropriation of its title, the name was changed to The Athenian Mercury with the second number. (SEE: Graham, English Literary Periodicals pp. 30-37; McEwen, The Oracle of the Coffee House: John Dunton's Athenian Mercury, Huntington Library, 1972.)

Wear and chipping to the left edge, just touching a few letters on the verso (professionally backed with archival paper); bottom edge trimmed close with loss of the publisher's imprint on the verso; mild toning and a couple of light spots and creases.

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. This first number set the tone for all those that were to come, covering questions as varied as: Whether the Torments of the damn'd are visible to the Saints in Heaven? & vice-versa?; How came the Spots in the Moon?; Whether 'tis lawful for a Man to beat his Wife? It concludes with an "Advertisement" for submissions: "All Persons whatever may be resolved gratis in any Question that their own satisfaction or Curiosity shall prompt 'em to, if they send their Questions by a Penny Post Letter to Mr. Smith at his Coffee-house in Stocks-Market in the Poultry…"