[Rarebooks] fa: ABRAHAM COWLEY [Nahum Tate, Aphra Behn ] SIX BOOKS OF PLANTS 1689 - Folio/First Ed.

[ArCh]

Listed now, auction ending Sunday, April 29. Images and more details can be found at the URL below or by searching for the seller name arch_in_la. 

http://tinyurl.com/y93zryy8

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
Ann Arbor, MI, USA


Abraham Cowley; [Nahum Tate, Aphra Behn, etc., trans.]: The Third Part of the Works of Mr. Abraham Cowley, being his Six Books of Plants, Never before Printed in English: Viz. The First and Second of Herbs. The Third and Fourth of Flowers. The Fifth and Sixth of Trees. Now made English by several Hands. With a Necessary Index. London: Printed [by Mary Clark] for Charles Harper, at the Flower-de-luce over against S. Dunstan’s Church in Fleet-street, 1689. FIRST EDITION. Folio (29.5 cm) in early/period mottled calf; [20], 166, [2] pp.; Wing C6665; ESTC R21164.

The first edition in English of Cowley’s botanical poems, originally published in Latin in 1662. The translators include the poet Nahum Tate, who also wrote the dedication and preface, and the playwright Aphra Behn. Along with poetical paeans to the rose, anemone, dafadill (sic), tulip, sage, rosemary, spleenwort or miltwast, and a host others, the work also has the distinction of containing the earliest reference to coca in English literature (“Our Varicocha first this Coca sent, / Endowed with Leaves of wondrous Nourishment, / Whose Juice suck’d in, and to the Stomach ta’n / Long Hunger and long Labor can sustain...”) and even describes the early stages of the international drug trade: (“Nor Coca only useful art at home, / A famous Merchandize thou art become: / A thousand Paci and Vicugni [vicuña?] groan, / Yearly beneath thy Loads, and for thy sake alone / The spacious World’s to us by Commerce known.”

Abraham Cowley (1618-1667), one of the leading poets of his time, was also a dramatist, a Royalist spy, and one of the first members of the Royal Society. These translations of his Books of Plants were first issued, posthumously, as the third part of his collected works, simultaneously with the sixth edition of the second part. “As poetry they are not particularly distinguished, but they are very good botany” (Kunitz and Haycraft).

Binding worn and rubbed, showing some old leather repairs, front board detached, rear board starting; the front (blank) endpaper is torn at the  gutter; an early owner, Mary Parker, has signed her name to the dedication page and has also added a few ink doodles to the title-page and elsewhere; contents mildly toned with scattered generally light spotting and soiling, one leaf with a larger stain from something having been spilled on it, a few small chips and creases to the page edge, else sound. Front paste-down with the bookplate of noted English bibliophile Charles Benson.