Twenty-Four Books of the Holy Scriptures, The.
[Judaica]. Leeser, Isaac. The Twenty-Four Books of the Holy Scriptures: Carefully Translated According to the Massoretic Text, After the best Jewish Authorities. Philadelphia: C. Sherman Prints, Sterotyped by L. Johnson & Co., 5617 [1857].
Thick 12mo.; red satin book mark; a.e.g.; full contemporary red calf, elaborately stamped in gilt, with the owner’s name stamped in gilt; light wear to extremities, lightly shaken. In a specially built cloth slipcase.
Second edition; the 1857 variant, of which Singerman records one copy—Hills does not record an 1856 [5616] edition: Singerman 1418; Hills 1664. This edition, though significantly smaller than the first edition (which was published in folio), reprints the slightly emended text of that edition and includes a new, more comprehensive preface by Leeser, in which he defends the need for a new translation in the format he has designed, and calls attention to the flaws of existing editions. The paragraph in which he distinguishes this edition from the first merits quoting in full:
The quarto edition of this work appeared two years ago; and, although the translator cannot flatter himself that it has met with such a reception as would have gratified his ambition, he has been stimulated, by the indulgent judgment pronounced by several eminent men every way able to form an opinion, to make an effort to render it more accessible to all classes than an expensive and heavy quarto could expect to be, although he regrets that the shape and size of the pages have prevented him appending the notes to this with which the other is enriched. But in preparing this work anew for the press the whole has been carefully subjected to the closest scrutiny, and improved and corrected wherever it was deemed necessary.
The full morocco binding is something of a mystery. The ticket on the front pastedown unequivocally identifies the binding as both English and contemporary with publication; and the ownership stamp in the front cover suggests that the shop of J.A. Joel executed the work for a Jewish Englishwoman–the distinctly English prefix of “St.” before the “Losky” supports our contention. All that noted, a question persists: how did a copy of this indisputably scarce second American edition of a book whose first edition commercially disappointed its editor wind its way into the London Jewish community?
A lovely copy of a significant work.
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