Description
16mo, pp. 352 + colour frontispiece and engraved title-page and 6 plates printed in red and black. Original red cloth, boards blocked in blind, spine blocked in gilt, edges red. Spine ends bumped, spine gilding a little dulled.
Aristotle’s Works: Containing The Master-Piece, Directions for Midwifes, and Counsel and Advice to Child-Bearing Women. With Various Useful Remedies.
- London[?]: Published for the Booksellers [Printed by John Smith, Tooly Street, London] 1870
£70
Notes
A scarce later printing of this perennial clandestine bestseller of reproductive health. Anonymous and undated editions proliferated for more than a century, making this difficult to date, but the consensus among the handful of libraries on Library Hub, the holdings of which match the pagination, and also mention the crude (but charming) plates, is a date in the second half of the nineteenth century. York Minster catalogue it as 'either a reissue or a literatim reprint of a Milner edition', and this is probably based on direct comparison with an example they hold from the Halifax printer with identical pagination. Certainly John Smith (and with him the volume's purported London origin) may well be fictional, although his excessively quotidian name and the paucity of bibliographical reference for the Masterpiece make this difficult to confirm.
