[Rarebooks] fa: 1691 ATHENIAN MERCURY - On OPTICS & VISION &c. -2 ISSUES- WOODCUT ILLUSTRATIONS

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, auctions ending Sunday, February 17. More details and images can be found at the URL below or by searching under the seller name arch_in_la.

http://tinyurl.com/al7rkjj

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
L.A.

The Athenian Mercury. Vol. 2, Number 1. Tuesday, May 26, 1691. [and] Number 2. Saturday, May 30, 1691. London: Printed for P. Smart [John Dunton], 1691. Two folio sheets (32.5 x 19.5 cm.; 12 3/4 x 7 3/4 in.) printed on both sides, joined together at the left edge to make four pp. Old paper repair to the gutter where the sheets meet, mild toning and wear to the edges, two or three light creases.

Two consecutive issues of this popular late seventeenth-century English coffeehouse newspaper, both with a woodcut diagram, uncommon in that the Athenian Mercury rarely carried illustrations. The first illustrates the editors' answer to a reader's question: "What's the Reason, that when we view our selves, or any other Object in a Glass, the Image appears as far behind the surface of the Glass as the Object represented is distant from it?" The second diagram accompanies the reply to a reader asking: "How a Wall that points directly from East to West, shou'd come to have the Sun, shine on the North side of it before six of the Clock in the Evening in the Summer time?" Other burning questions answered in these issues include: Why a dead corps should bleed when toucht by the Murtherer? What Language 'twas Balaam's Ass spake? Whether there be such People as Cannibals? In what part of the Body is the Soul? Whether Adam and Eve had Navels or no? Whence comes Corns and Warts, and how may they be destroyed? We have a particular Relation of a Cow which... calv'd a monstrous sort of a Calf... with an Excressence of Flesh like a Commode; Pray what Natural or other Reason may be assign'd for such a strange Production? etc, etc.