[Rarebooks] fa: ATHENIAN MERCURY Newspaper 1691-93 - 175+ ISSUES

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, auctions ending Sunday, June 7. More details and images can be found at the URL below or by searching for the seller name arch_in_la.

http://tinyurl.com/qfzvn76

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
L.A.

The Athenian Mercury. Vols. 2, 4-10. London: Printed by/for John Dunton, 1691-1693. Ca. 176 separate issues; folio sheets measuring 32.5 x 19.5 cm (ca. 12 3/4 x 7 3/4 in.), printed on both sides. Browning to vols. 7 and 8, worming to the bottom margins of vol. 7; intermittent browning and modest marginal worming to others; age-toning, occasional spotting and stains, generally light edge wear, small stab-holes to the left margins; last issue torn and tattered with loss to text. Housed in a custom clamshell box.

An incomplete run of ca. 176 issues of the newspaper, from June 3, 1691, to July 4, 1693, with the volume title-pages and prefatory matter (prefaces, advertisements, tables of contents). Lacking vol. 3 and scattered issues throughout the other volumes. The best-known and longest-lived of all seventeenth-century literary periodicals, The Athenian Mercury was a widely-read staple of the coffee houses. The first advice column and the first newspaper to use the question-and-answer format, 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 twice weekly 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, Dunton and his two principal writers, Richard Sault and Samuel Wesley (father of Charles and John Wesley), answered nearly 6000 questions, both weighty and frivolous, on a dizzying array of topics, including theology, philosophy, politics, health, natural history, science,  literature, love, courtship and marriage, sex, etiquette, etc., etc. The topics covered in these issues include all of those just mentioned, as well as capital punishment, abortion, earthquakes, dueling, the origin of barber poles, Italian Padlocks (chastity belts), whether wearing earrings and black patches is a sin, and many, many others.