The Boston Book Market, 1679-1700 (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: books, valued at i 3.12.8, were sent by the Richard, Thomas Jolis, master. No subsequent importations from London are to be found in the Usher papers. John Dunton The total value of books imported in the seven years by one bookseller is impressive?567; but it is as measures of the nature of the Boston book market that the lists serve as good evidence. It is a happy coincidence that while our last list is dated April, 1685, in Olober John Dunton, bookseller of London, sailed for Boston in the Susan and Thomas, Thomas Jenner, master. Dunton had been with Thomas Parkhurst of the Bible and Three Crowns, at the lower end of Cheapside, near Mercer's Chapel, one of the more important publishers of books; but in 1681 he made a venture by himself, and issued from the Black Raven, Poultry/his first publication, a volume by that long-suffering non-conformist tutor, Thomas Doolittle,2 whose publisher Park- hurst had been. The Black Raven is more accurately located on his title-pages as "over against the Stocks Market," "over against the Compter," or "corner of Prince Street, near the Royal Exchange." The house, described by Dunton as large, had been occupied by 1 Whitmoreis thus in error when he says that Dunton first opened his shop? Black Raven?in 1 ? 8 8," on the day the Prince of Orange entered London. ' ' Introduction to Dunton's Leiters (Prince Society), xi. Dunton states that the Prince Street house was taken by him after his marriage?probably in 1682. Term Catalogue (Arber), i. 458?November, 1681. one Roger White, " who was so much noted for his courage in arresting Justice Balch for sending him to prison from Dr. Annesley's QDunton's father-in-law]] Meeting." It was to this house that Dunton brought his wife, Elizabeth Annesley, whom he married in August, 1682, an...