DONNE (John). [Greek title:] BIATHANATOS. A Declaration Of that Paradoxe, or Thesis, That Self-homicide is not so naturally Sin, That It may never be otherwise. Wherein, The Nature, and the extent of all those Lawes, Which seem to be violated by this Act, Are diligently surveyed. Written by John Donne, who afterwards received Orders from the Church of England, and dyed Deane, of St. Pauls, London. Published by Authority. London, Printed for Humphrey Moseley, and are to be sold at his Shop at the Princes Armes in St Pauls Churchyard, 1648. Pott 4to; half-title not called for, but lacking the blank, A1, as usual; cancel title printed in black and red within a border of type-ornaments, mounted on a stub; imprimatur (dated 1644) at end of text; ¶^{2 - 4}, A (Italic), A - I, K - T, V, X - Z, Aa - Dd⁴, Ee² (v. note); pp.[iii - xvi (not paginated)]+1 - 192+191 - 218; contemporary full mottled calf, sides tooled with double twin-ruled frame, floral corner ornaments and stylised four-floretted central ornament, edges ruled gilt, spine, rebacked to match, with six gilt-ruled compartments, five tooled with florets, gilt, the sixth enclosing a lettering-piece of darker brown, date in smaller compartment at tail; brown burnished edges; marbled end-papers, strengthened at the gutters with later (probably Victorian) marbled paper. Small, pale marks on blank fore-margins of ¶3 and 4; rust-mark (apparently caused by a pin trapped between C3 and C4) affecting extreme inner margins of C2 - D2; single small ink-spot on D3v obscuring two letters, but with no loss of sense; small brown stain (an inch by a quarter inch, probably an old ink smudge) on centre of E2, but not obscuring the text, and small ink smudge on blank lower margin of E3r; inked symbol just touching the ruled border of F4; two pale fox-spots on X2, lightly offset onto X3r; small hole in blank margin of Cc2 due to an original paper flaw; light marking, mostly to margins, of Cc4v, Dd1r, Dd4v, and Ee1r, which since they match in shape and position on the outside edges of three sheets, must have occurred prior to binding; three small, pale, fox-spots on Ee2; apart from these minor faults, an excellent, clean, copy with good margins.

First edition second issue with a cancel Moseley title-page printed in red and black and dated 1648 tipped in instead of the original undated all black title-page which gave the publisher as John Dawson. The book published posthumously was licensed for printing by Donne's son in 1644 but not issued until 1646 or 1647. Bound up without the conjugate pair of leaves signed *1 and *2 containing the list of ‘Authors cited in the Book' which seem to have been added as an afterthought. This copy in a contemporary binding although rebacked seems not to have been resewn and it can be stated with fair certainty that they have never been present here. Gathering A begins with a page numbered ‘1' which is actually p.9 of The Contents and these continue to the end of gathering B the printer having apparently allowed eight pages for prelims. in addition probably to two further leaves for title and dedication which were to be printed conjugate with the two leaves of gathering Ee completing that sheet. When the copy for the Contents arrived however it required twelve full leaves necessitating gathering A (Italic) to precede gathering A and this was inserted without cancelling or altering the page numbers which had already apparently been set up in the formes. The title and the dedicatory Epistle moreover required three leaves rather than the two allowed and instead of being printed conjugate with gathering Ee they were printed on a separate sheet the first leaf of which was left blank. It would still have been possible at this point to have printed the list of authors on the blank leaf of the new first gathering by setting it in smaller type as was done in the second edition of 1700 and it could have been so arranged in the forme that it would follow The Epistle Dedicatory as it in fact did there. Since this was not done it seems likely that this gathering had been printed before the inclusion of the list of authors (which really exists for the sake of its closing note) had been contemplated and that a decision was taken at some late point in the printing to utilise for this purpose the two blank leaves. (That the list of authors was printed conjugate with gathering Ee is certain from the fact that some copies are known in which it is found folded between Ee1 and Ee2). Whether this was done at the start of the print run of the final gathering cannot be certainly stated and it is possible that the earliest copies printed may have been without these leaves. In the present copy gathering ‘S' is a cancel with the corrected text as in every copy known but one (in the Library of Congress). The first of Donne's controversial writings ‘Biathanatos' was written probably in 1608 and circulated in ms. amongst his friends though he had a somewhat equivocal attitude to it "because it is on a misinterpretable subject" as he wrote to to Sir Robert Karre and was unwilling either to see it printed or destroyed. With the armorial bookplate on the front paste-down of Alexander Henderson the (presumably later) armorial bookplate on the front end-paper of Charles W.G. Howard recording it as the gift of The Rt. Hon. Sir David Dundas Knt. of Ochtertyre (dated 1777) and the ownership signature of twentieth century Donne scholar I.A. Shapiro who has added a brief pencilled note of the Wing reference to the verso of the front end-paper. Loosely laid in is a leaf of bibliographical notes in his hand. Keynes 48; Wing D.1859

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