(John Armstrong) | An exceedingly rare Franklin imprint

[John Armstrong]

The Art of Preserving Health: A Poem. Philadelphia: Re-printed, and Sold by B. Franklin, 1745

4to (192 x 124 mm). Complete with all four titles, woodcut titlepage ornament and tailpieces (Miller, appendix B, 19 and 21); dampstaining, early ownership marking on title page. Period-style full calf, blind-ruled, maroon morocco spine label. Housed in a custom dark blue slipcase and chemise.

An exceedingly rare Franklin imprint. The first American edition of physician-poet John Armstrong's poem on health and well-being.

John Armstrong (1709-1779), the Scottish-born poet and physician, blended his two professions when he penned this long didactic poem in blank verse. It is divided into four books, each pertaining to a different pillar of good health: air, diet, exercise, and the passions. Despite having "a somewhat unpromising subject for poetic treatment [it] is gracefully and ingeniously handled" (John W. Cousin, A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature, London: J.M. Dent, 1910).

Though rarely read today, except perhaps by scholars of the eighteenth-century, the poem was very successful when first published in London by Andrew Millar in 1744, and it afforded its author a degree of contemporary fame. Armstrong published both prose and verse regularly after 1744, and was an active member in London's literary circles. He corresponded extensively with Tobias Smollett, James Thomson, John Wilkes, and others. He also practiced as a physician and published a several medical works. It is a testament to The Art of Preserving Health's rapid and widespread success that Benjamin Franklin, across the Atlantic in Philadelphia, decided to reprint the poem so soon after it first appeared in London.

Rare — ESTC lists only 12 copies in institutions; the last copy that sold at auction was in 1941 at Parke Bernet, and prior to that, copies appeared at Henkels in 1932, 1921, and 1917; Rosenbach offered a copy in the trade in 1917; the great Franklin collector Samuel Pennypacker never owned a copy.

Literature:

Miller, 367; ESTC no. W872; Austin, R.B. Early American Medical Imprints, 78; Evans, 5532; Sabin, 2023; Lewis M. Knapp, "Dr. John Armstrong, Littérateur, and Associate of Smollett, Thomson, Wilkes, and Other Celebrities," in PMLA, Vol. 59, No. 4 (Dec., 1944), pp. 1019-1058.

Provenance:

Largely illegible early ownership signature on the titlepage, possibly beginning with "A" and "G."