The Isle of Pines | Page 8

were a thousand to one chances in favor of the
Dutch printer obtaining the pamphlet from London; there were ten
thousand chances to one against his getting it from Massachusetts. I
reject the supposition that this was a Cambridge imprint for that reason

alone.
Additional evidence hostile to the claim may be adduced. The copy of
the first tract in the British Museum is the S. G. for Banks and
Harper.{1}
1 It is erroneously described as "an abridgment."
No other London imprint is to be found there or in the larger 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