Author: [DUNTON (John)]:
Title: Athenian Sport: or, Two Thousand Paradoxes Merrily Argued, To Amuse and Divert the Age: As A Paradox in praise of a Paradox. Corporeal Affections remain after Separation... And so on, to the Defence of 2000 Paradoxes (or Pleasant Theses) which seem Strange, and Contrary to the Common Opinion. With Improvements from the Honourable Mr. Boyle, Lock, Norris, Collins, Cowley, Dryden, Garth, Addison, and other Illustrious Wits. By a Member of the Athenian Society.
Description: London, Printed for B. Bragg..., 1707. FIRST EDITION. 8Vvo, 195 x 113 mms., pp. xxxii, 544, including half-title, later panelled calf, spine gilt in compartments; spine very dried and cracked, joints cracked, a so-so copy, with the armorial bookplate of Wolfe de Forenaughts on the front paste-down end-paper and the autograph of Philip De:Wolfe on the title-page, and another autograph scored through. The book comes from the Wolfe family who appear prominently in the life of George Berkeley, author Alciphon. has a variant of the Wolfe bookplate (one with the family name, "Wolfe de Forenaughts", engraved, in this case, just beneath the frame enclosing the trebled wolf-heads), and the ownership inscription, on the right-hand side at the top of the title-page, is, in this case, longer: "Phillpott: Wolfe." The "P" is unusual, being lollipop-shaped in its upper half and with a jack-boot upturn to the left in its lower half. The bookseller and general literary gadfly John Dunton (1659 - 1732) entertained, or at least tried to, several generations of British readers with prose and poetic whimsies, anecdotes, and paradoxes, one of which must be in the title, as there are only 139 paradoxes, eight of which are by John Donne. The present work was preceded by a similar, and very successful, book, Athenian Gazette, or, Casuistical Mercury, though Dunton published pretty much the same kind of book each time he went into print. Helen Berry in her ODNB entry notes that "Dunton was the first bookseller to realize the market potential among female readers: the Athenian Mercury appealed to 'all men and both Sexes', and his Ladies Dictionary (1694) was produced as a 'General Entertainment for the Fair Sex'. The poet Elizabeth Singer Rowe contributed to the Athenian Mercury, and Dunton published her Poems on Several Occasions in 1696." Stephen Parks, John Dunton and the English Book Trade (1976), no. 339.

Keywords: humour performing arts literature prose


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