Vindication of the Rights of Woman, A.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With strictures on political and moral subjects. Boston: Printed at Boston by Peter Edes for Thomas and Andrews, 1792.
8vo.; toning to text block; pencil annotations covering rear endpapers; full calf, red spine label stamped in gilt. In a specially made quarter-morocco slipcase.
Second American edition, following the Philadelphia publication by William Gibbons earlier that year. Isaiah Thomas and Ebenezer T. Andrews promoted their edition rather aggressively, through serial excerpts and reviews in more than one issue of their Massachusetts Magazine: Or Monthly Museum of Knowledge and Rational Entertainment, which they published jointly from 1789 through 1796; the October 1792 and February 1793 issues are present in this collection. While it has not been possible to place with certainty the printing of the extracts in relation to the Philadelphia text, likely the extracts, as well as the Boston printing of Vindication, appeared after the Gibbons’s. The writer’s name appeared as “Woolstonecraft” in the Philadelphia printing, but was corrected to “Wollstonecraft” in the Boston printing, a misspelling suggesting that Thomas and Andrews may have been working from Gibbons’s text. Windle A5d.
Isaiah Thomas (1749-1831), printer, author and founder of the American Antiquarian Society, was the preeminent American printer of his day. His newspaper the Massachusetts Spy proclaimed the printer’s revolutionary sympathies and throughout the war Thomas “served as official printer for the patriots of the colony” [American Biography]. With the conclusion of the war, Thomas established branches of his printing business in Boston, Newburyport, Baltimore and Albany.
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