The Isle of Pines | Page 8

libraries of England. Of the three other copies located, that sold at audion (the White Kennett copy) and that in the Massachusetts Historical Society came direct from England, and the actual provenance of the copy in the New York Historical Society is not known. It belonged to Rufus King, long United States minister near the court of St James's, and is bound with other tracts under a general title of "Topographical Collection, Vol. I." The binding, Mr. Kelby tells me, is American. There is no mark to show when or where King obtained the pamphlet, and the Society did not receive it until 1906. That Rufus King belongs as much to Massachusetts as to New York is too slight a foundation on which to erect a claim that this particular tract was of Massachusetts origin.
[ 21 ]In no case, therefore, can an American setting to any one of the four known copies of the S. G. "Isle of Pines" be established.{1} The probabilities are all against Samuel Green. The incident is a good example of the danger of giving play to the imagination on an appearance of a combination of fads cemented by interest.
Thus disappears from our memory the certain identification of the S. G. pamphlet as an early issue of the press in Cambridge, and with it goes my identification of the Johnson pamphlet with the S. G. title-page--a veritable pipe dream. It might be urged that as White Kennett was collecting on America, it would be more than probable that he would have had an American issue; but his own catalogue of 1713 describes the nine-page tract, and that is our London edition. I might claim still that my Johnson was a Johnson, with a London title-page; but the typographical adornment on the first page of its text is just the same as the adornment on the first page of the London issue--three rows of fleur-de-lys, thirty-seven in each row, and the same kind of type characters.{2}
1 Lowndes indexes it under George Pine, and describes a nine-page trait--probably the one now in the British Museum. He quotes a sale of a copy in it 60 (Puttkk) for ��4.10s. He indexes the combined parts under Sloetten, and notes a copy, with the plate, sold in the White Knights sale for 1s..
2 To attempt to reason from types or rule of thumb measurements, however suggestive, leads to indefinite conclusions. For example, the width of the type page of the S. G. issue of the first part is exactly that of the English issue of the second part, but the former has 33 tines to the page and the latter a a. The width of the page in the variant S. G. issue is narrower and there are 38 and 39 lines to the page. But in the London second part the width of page varies by a quarter of an inch. We have Marmaduke Johnson's issue of Paine's Daily Meditations y issued in 1670 in connection with S. G. The ornamental border of fleur-de-lys is entirely different from those in the S. G. Isle of Pines. A copy of Johnson's issue of Scottow's translation of Bretz on the Anabaptists, printed in 1668, the very year of the Isle of Pines, shows a different foot of italics from that used in the Isle of Pines variant, yet the roman characters in the two pieces seem identical, and the width of page is exactly the same.
[ 22 ]So I bid farewell to my theory, and can only congratulate myself on having cleared one point--the London issue--and on having introduced a new confusion by the discovery of a second London issue with an identical title-page, a problem for the future to solve. I much doubt if a true Johnson issue will ever be found, for I believe the action of the authorities prevented its birth.
In the library of Mr. Henry E. Huntington is a London issue of which I do not find another example. It contains sixteen pages, and the title-page gives neither printer's name nor place of publication. It may be the first issue, or it may be a later re-issue of the tract, for the type, especially the italic, is better than that in the S. G. issue. The punctuation also is more carefully looked after, and the whole appearance suggests an eighteenth century print. As the original was duly licensed, there was no reason to suppress the names of printer or booksellers. Nor could the contents of the piece call out controversy or hostility from any political faction or religious following. It was proper for the author to omit his name from the publication, if he desired to remain unknown; but the publisher, having the support of the licenser, had every reason to advertise his connexion with the tract, although