Robinson Crusoe and Friends

Previously unrecorded edition of Robinson Crusoe.

The popularity of Robinson Crusoe dates from its first publication in 1719, and literally hundreds of editions have followed, many of them in America since it first appeared here in 1774. Like all other 18th century American editions, the one published by Woodhouse in Philadelphia in 1791 is an abridgment; like many of those others, its existence was until now known only from an advertisement. Thanks to the generosity of Dr. Shirley Pearlman Leva, the Woodhouse edition has come to Georgetown in the company of nearly a hundred other volumes, many of them collected by Dr. Leva's father, Washington bookseller David Pearlman.

Besides the Crusoe, the gift includes books in a variety of fields: the first publication (1634) of a volume of neoLatin tragedies by various Jesuit authors; the first American edition of Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1860); and the first edition of Oliver Wendell Holmes's The Common Law (1881), as well as that of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Vegetable (1923, in dust jacket). The rare Baptist Confession of Faith (Philadelphia, 1765) rubs shoulders with a dozen volumes from Thomas Knox's very popular "Boy Travellers" series in their florid polychrome bindings of the late 19th century. And, against all odds, the collection includes yet another previously unknown 18th century American imprint, the 1795 second edition of Jedidiah Morse's History of America.

An unexpected treasure is the pair of scrapbooks kept by Charles Daniel Drake (18111892), briefly a senator from Missouri and then for 15 years chief justice of the U. S. Court of Claims. In them Drake preserved copies of his numerous political and literary publications from 1828 to 1860, a real boon since most of them appeared in periodicals of rather limited distribution, and many of them were published anonymously, or over a variety of pen names. The gift also includes records of William Gunton, a Washington pharmacist and sundries merchant, whose shop in 1822 was located on the northwest corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and 9th Street, N.W. Much of the volume is given over to records of prescriptions made up during the first seven months of 1824. The remainder, however, of greater interest to us after this lapse of time, consists of a priced inventory of Gunton's shop and household, from which we learn that his reading material included such things as a copy of The Federalist, Lewis and Clark, Cowper's Task, and the memoirs of Napoleon.