[Rarebooks] fa: ROGER L'ESTRANGE - MEMORIAL upon the LIBERTIES OF THE PRESSE AND PULPIT - 1681

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, auctions ending Sunday, July 28. More details and images can be found at the URL below or by searching under the seller name arch_in_la.

http://tinyurl.com/k5tldpv

Thanks,
Ardwight Chamberlain
L.A.



Roger L'Estrange: A Seasonable Memorial in Some Historical Notes upon the Liberties of the Presse and Pulpit: with the Effects of Popular Petitions, Tumults, Associations, Impostures, and Disaffected Common Councils. The third edition. To all Good Subjects and True Protestants. London: Printed by J. Bennet for Henry Brome at the Gun in S. Pauls Church-yard,  1681. Small 4to pamphlet (19.5 cm); [2] + 37 + [1] pp. Wing L1304; ESTC R233644.

L'Estrange argues against an unbridled freedom of the press, seeing in it the seeds of sedition and civil war, "his pen driven by the memory of Charles I's downfall and the conviction that this was precipitated by the 'paper war' of the 1640s, fueled by the twin forces of religious dissent and republicanism" (McElligot, ed., Fear, Exclusion And Revolution: Roger Morrice And Britain in the 1680s). Disbound from a nonce volume with remnants of earlier binding on the spine; mild toning to the edges of the leaves, otherwise very clean and crisp, leaves securely bound.

Roger L'Estrange (1616-1704), was a publisher, editor, prolific pamphleteer and pugnacious controversialist, one of England's earliest true journalists and a key figure in the Restoration period. Above all, he was an arch-Royalist and Tory, his fortunes rising and falling with the House of Stuart throughout his long life. Exiled after the English Civil War, he flourished during the Restoration, starting two separate newspapers and receiving a royal appointment as Surveyor of the Imprimery, or censor of the press, a post in which he executed his duties with a ruthless zeal that did not endear him to everyone; he took a seat in Parliament as member for Winchester and was knighted by James II in 1685. With the Glorious Revolution and the coming of William III, however, he lost his influence and offices, was arrested several times, and eventually found it safer to recede from public life and devote his talents to translating foreign works.