The Isle Of Pines (1668) / and An Essay in Bibliography by Worthington Chauncey Ford

Chapter 5: PREFATORY NOTE

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About This Book

A short imaginative relation recounts a voyage that ends in shipwreck on a remote southern island and the subsequent development of a populous community descended from the survivors, with attention to social arrangements, reproduction, and later contact by visiting mariners. An extensive bibliographical essay accompanies the narrative, documenting the pamphlet's printing and licensing context, variants and continental editions, attribution puzzles, and auction discoveries, and offering a reconstruction of how differing issues and imprints shaped modern judgments of rarity and authorship.

PREFATORY NOTE

My curiosity on the "Isle of Pines" was aroused by the sale of a copy in London and New York in 1917, and was increased by the discovery of two distinct issues in the Dowse Library, in the Massachusetts Historical Society. As my material grew in bulk and the history of this hoax perpetrated in the seventeenth century developed, I thought it of sufficient interest to communicate an outline of the story to the Club of Odd Volumes, of Boston, October 23, 1918. The results of my investigations are more fully given in the present volume. I acknowledge my indebtedness to the essay of Max Hippe, "Eine vor-De-foesche Englische Robinsonade," published in Eugen Kölbing's "Englische Studien" xix. 66.

WORTHINGTON CHAUNCEY FORD

Boston, February, 1920