Product Description
First British edition.
London: Reprinted for J.
Johnson, 1792.
Octavo (8 7/8" x 5 5/8", 226mm x 143mm): binder's blank, a4 b8 B-Ll8 Mm2 [$4 signed; -Bb2].
278 leaves, pp.
iii (title, blank, contents) iv-xxiv, 1 2-520, [12] (11pp.
index, directions to the binder).
With an engraved frontispiece, a folding map of Florida and seven engraved plates (one folding).
Bound in the publisher's blue boards with the backing renewed.
With a (new) paper spine-label.
All edges of the text-block untrimmed.
Rebacked, with a new spine label.
Front hinge split, with some loss at the upper edge.
Extremities of the boards worn, with some loss to the front fore-corners.
General moderate soiling and scuffing to the boards.
Renewed end-papers.
Deckles a bit tanned.
A very little offsetting and tanning near the plates (with the original tissue-guard to the frontispiece).
Exceptional margins, and excellent impressions of the plates.
William Bartram (1729-1823) was born in Philadelphia, son of the naturalist John Bartram whom Linnaeus so admired.
Like his father, William was unsatisfied to observe in his backyard; instead he traveled extensively in the Southeast (from 1773), leaving some of the earliest and most vivid descriptions of that part of the country.
His was the great curiosity of the savant, not limiting himself to the flora or fauna, terrain or cultures he encountered, but weaving all into a tapestry of the region.
He was the first naturalist properly to explore the thickly forested and swampy terrain of Florida, and it is this for which his writing is now most prized.
The density of editions in Bartram's lifetime is a testament to their enduring appeal.
Nearly as important as the work's scientific pedigree is its influence on literature.
Coleridge and Wordsworth certainly read it; Wordsworth cites it explicitly in a note to his poem "Ruth" (Lyrical Ballads (1800) II.
106).
The novelty of the country and its inhabitants surely sparked great curiosity, but it is surely the immediacy and rhapsody of Bartram's prose that so engaged the Romantic poets.
Likely it was a book very much like the present copy that made it into the hands of the Romantic poets --rather a remarkable survival of the London edition in boards.
Howes 223b, Sabin 3870.
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