[Rarebooks] fa: FREEMASONS & ILLUMINATI - PROOFS OF A CONSPIRACY - John Robison • 1797

[ArCh]

Listed now, auction ending Sunday, April 14. Images and more details can be found at the URL below or by searching for the seller name arch_in_la. 

http://tinyurl.com/y5h3jodx

Thanks,
Ardwight Chamberlain
Ann Arbor, MI, USA


John Robison: Proofs of a Conspiracy Against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, Carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies. Collected from Good Authorities... The Second Edition, corrected; To which is added a Postscript. London: Printed for T. Cadell jun. and W. Davies; and W. Creech, Edinburgh, 1797. First London edition and first edition thus. Tall 8vo (22.5), untrimmed and unopened in original publisher's boards; [4], 531, [1] pp. ESTC T100161.

Preceded by an Edinburgh edition of the same year, but this London edition is the first to contain Robison's 32-page postscript, which was also issued separately. Wear and staining to the spine, toning to the contents, most noticeably on the first and last few leaves, else clean and sound, securely bound; unopened (meaning the page-gatherings are still joined at the top edges as issued), hence unread.

Dedicated to William Wyndham, the Secretary of State for War. An eminent mathematician, chemist. and scientific writer (John Watt described him as "a man of the clearest head and the most science of anybody I have ever known"), John Robison was a Mason himself, but in this "curious" work he set out to prove that some factions of Freemasonry, and most especially the notorious secret fraternity of "Illuminati," were plotting to overthrow all the religions and governments of the world, and that their handiwork could be seen in the bloody excesses of the French Revolution. Though described as "a lasting monument of fatuous credulity" (Chambers's Encyclopaedia, 1896), Robison's work was popular and influential in its time and was instrumental in launching a conspiracy theory that still reverberates to this day.