Rare Book Monthly
Book Catalogue Reviews - October - 2006 Issue
"The Ways of the World" from Helen R. Kahn
Forster's unofficial account of Cook's second voyage.
Three centuries ago, England and Scotland joined to create the Kingdom of Great Britain. Not everyone in Scotland liked the idea. Some were afraid Scotland would be subsumed by its larger neighbor to the south. Item 99 is a 1706 publication, To the Loyal and Religious Hearts in Parliament, Some Few Effects of the Union Proposed Between Scotland and England. It lists nine negative consequences of the merger, such as, "Our Name shall be Extinct as a Nation, And like the Jews, We shall be Vagabonds over the whole Earth." $450. Item 121 is The Insecurity Of a Printed Overture for an Act for the Church's Security. This recounts the Church of Scotland's fear of the effect of union. $400.
Item 35 is an 1842 medical text, The Practice of Medicine, or A Treatise on Special Pathology and Therapeutics, by Robley Dunglison, M.D. Englishman Dunglison was invited by Thomas Jefferson in 1824 to chair the new medical department at the University of Virginia. He became Jefferson's friend and personal physician, and attended the former president during his final illness two years later. Dunglison would go on to write many respected medical textbooks in the years ahead. $500.
Edward Palmer's personal wanderings would provide the basis for his 1871 book, The Desert of the Exodus: Journeys on Foot in the Wilderness of The Forty Years' Wanderings... Palmer traveled through the Sinai meeting with local Bedouins to gather names for places along the route of the Biblical Exodus. In a second trip, he would walk 600 miles from Sinai to Jerusalem. His account pictures the land as it was a century and a half ago. Item 80. $650.
Helen R. Kahn and Associates may be visited online at www.hrkahnbooks.com, telephone 514-844-5344.
