It also offers much information on the local Indians and contains a folding woodcut map of New England, which in the copy found in the Christie’s East sale of December 11 has a reset heading indicating that it is a copy of the otherwise identical second edition of 1635.
Sold as a duplicate by the British Museum in 1787, this ex-Signet Library copy was rebound in calf in the 19th century and is stamped with the society’s gilt arms.
The first edition, I imagine, is extremely scarce, even the copy in the superb Siebert library on ‘The North American Indian and the American Frontier’ was a second edition – a copy bound in early vellum that made $45,000 at Sotheby’s in 1999.
Other highlights from the sale included the following, together with the three lots illustrated right.
New England for the ‘mind-travelling Reader’
WILLIAM Wood’s New Englands Prospect..., first published in London in 1634, was intended to “enrich the knowledge of the mind-travelling Reader, or benefit the future Voyager”.
