HOLY BIBLE

The Holy Bible, containing the Old Testament and the New:

£950

London: Printed by John Baskett, printer to the King's most Excellent Majesty, & by the Assigns of Thomas Newcomb and Henry Hills deceas'd. 1715.

Bound with The Book of Common Prayer, London: Charles Bill and the Executrix of Thomas Newcomb, deceased, 1709. And with The Whole Book of Psalms: Collected into English Metre by Thomas Sternhold, John Hopkins, And Others. London: Printed by J. Heptinstall, 1717. 8vo. 192x120mm. Unpaginated. Collates as follows: BCP a4, A8-G6. Bible pi1, A8-Z8, As8-Zz8, Aaa8-Zzz8, Aaaa8-Cccc4. Psalms: A4-L4. General title for the Bible dated 1715 with the separate title page for the New Testament dated 1710. Contemporary black morocco decorated with gilt panel with gilt cornerpieces. Spine lavishly decorated in gilt. Extremities and head and foot of spine rubbed and worn and a split to the joint of upper cover at head and foot of spine. Some marking and fading to covers. All edges gilt. Marbled endpapers. Internally very good but with some waterstaining from Bbbb and Cccc of the New Testament.
The front pastedown has the very pretty book label "Martha Manning. Her Book. 1770." It is unclear exactly who this Martha Manning might be but there are two possible candidates. It might be the Martha Manning born in 1750 in Romford, Essex who married William Whitford in 1771.
A more exotic possibility is the Martha Manning who was the daughter of a William Manning, a business associate of Henry Laurens, one of the Founding Fathers and slave trader and rice planter. The Mannings had lived in St Kitts where they owned land but by the 1770s they had returned to London. In 1776, Henry Laurens's son John was in London studying law. Secretly, he married Martha Manning on October 26. The following year, Laurens left London and the pregnant Martha to return to America to fight in the Revolution. There he made his name working alongside Alexander Hamilton as an aide to George Washington. In 1780, Laurens was appointed to be the American special minister to France. Martha travelled to France to find her errant husband but, tragically, died there without seeing him.
In any case, this is a charming and beautiful bookplate and rare for it to belong to a woman at a time when few women owned books.
This edition appears to be unrecorded in Herbert. The closest is Herbert 933 which has the OT dated 1715 and the NT dated 1712 but our copy has a 1710 NT printed by the Assigns of Thomas Newcomb and Henry Hills whose first Bible was in 1710 but was a 12mo with the text ending on S2a whereas this Bible collates continuously throughout the OT and NT. Baskett's name which is on the Old Testament title page does not appear on the New Testament until the 1712 edition and so is absent here. A nice copy of an unrecorded variant.

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