A Journal of the Plague Year: Being Observations or Memorials, Of the most Remarkable Occurrences, As well Publick or Private, Which happened in London During the last Great Visitation In 1665. Written by a Citizen who continued all the while in London. Never made publick before.
London: E. Nutt, J. Roberts, A. Dodd, & J. Graves, 1722.
First edition, first printing of Daniel Defoe's fictional account of the Great Plague of 1665. [iv], 287 pp. (three pages misnumbered without interruption to text: 281 for 218, 290 for 270, and 291 for 271). Octavo, full calf, laced in boards. Contemporary Cambridge binding skillfully rebacked circa 19th century; dark topstain, all edges speckled red, red morocco title label to spine. Near Fine with moderate rubbing to board edges; rear hinge cracked but holding. Soiling, partially erased pencil inscriptions, and small owner label to endpapers. Thumbing throughout, several pages dog-eared, a handful of penciled check marks or corrections to text; contents overall clean. In a custom brown cloth chemise slipcase with very light wear. A beautiful book from the library of William A. Strutz, with a 1966 purchase slip from the Seven Gables Bookshop in New York, and bookseller correspondence laid in. Daniel Defoe's classic novel, published three years after his bestseller Robinson Crusoe, is likely based on the diary of his uncle Henry. The book makes good use of information about the bubonic plague gleaned from Bills of Mortality and newspaper accounts, creating a fictional memoir with the ring of truth. That ring gained a new resonance during the COVID-19 era, and the book had to be reprinted after selling out. In a 2020 article for the Royal Society of Medicine Henry Connor wrote that it "can also be read as a study of risk management in a time of crisis, a study in which the validity of the experiential observations of one man are contrasted with those derived from official statistical data." "Journal of the Plague Year, published in the same year as Moll Flanders and Col. Jack, may be Defoe's most under-appreciated great novel. H. F., the protagonist, lives in London throughout the plague, and he is torn between fleeing and staying, between pragmatic, even crass economic motives, and spiritual impulses, and, even more importantly, is obsessed with determining the reasons individuals get the plague" (ODNB).
Price: $45,000