Description

Easton Press leather edition of Daniel Defoe's "A Journal of the Plague Year, Etc.," a COLLECTOR'S edition, Illustrated by Signor Domenico Gnoli, Frontispiece Portrait of Defoe, Introduced by James Sutherland, one of the 100 GREATEST BOOKS EVER WRITTEN series, published in 197. Bound in hunter green leather, the book has camel tan moire silk end leaves, acid-free paper, Symth-sewn binding, hubbed spine, a satin book marker, gold gilding on three edges---in near FINE condition---except for a blank attached bookplate on inside flyleaf. Daniel Defoe, who lived from 1660---1731, was born in London, the son of a butcher. The Great Plague of London in 1665 was only the worse of many similar visitations since the Black Death of 1349 had carried off about one third of the English people. The epidemic of 1625 had killed 40,000 Londoners. Two parishes, St.Giles-in-the-Fields and Stepney, completed escaped the flames. Defoe described the public measures taken by authorities, such as the sequestration of the sick, the closing of infected houses, and the prohibition of assemblies, with their effect on the minds of the people. The symptoms of the disease, the circulation of the dead-carts, and burials in great pits, and the lamentable scenes witnessed by the supposed narrator are described with extraordinary vividness. The general effects of the epidemic, notably in the cessation of many trades, and the exodus from the city, are also set forth, and an estimate made of the total number of deaths from the disease. England was finally delivered from the plague by the GREAT FIRE of 1666. The book ends with these lines: "A dreadful Plague in London was, / In the Year Sixty Five, / Which swept an Hundred Thousand Souls/ Away; yet I alive!" 271 pages. I offer combined shippind.