THE HAPPINESS OF A PEOPLE IN THE WISDOME OF THEIR RULERS DIRECTING AND IN THE OBEDIENCE OF THEIR BRETHREN ATTENDING UNTO WHAT ISRAEL OUGHT TO DO

Boston: Printed by John Foster, 1676. FIRST EDITION. 190 x 138 mm. (7 1/2 x 5 3/4"). [36] leaves.
New retrospective sheepskin. In a very good cloth clamshell box with spine label. Evans 214: Howe 755; Sabin I, 499-500. ◆Title laid down and with small area of discoloration (where an ownership inscription has been effaced?), text carelessly trimmed by the original binder, leaving leaves cut close at head, with loss of headline and pagination, often grazing the first line of text and impacting its legibility on about 10 pages (but with lower margin quite ample), final opening somewhat yellowed and soiled, light dampstain on a handful of leaves. With obvious defects (and which 17th century American imprint doesn't have them?), but worth having as a rare and important book in the history of printing in America.

This is an extremely rare copy of one of the earliest books from the press of the first printer in Boston, issued in just the second year of printing in that city. The text is a sermon preached on election day, 3 May 1976, calling the governor, council, and magistrates of the Massachusetts-Bay colony "to the exercise of your civill Liberty (wherein much of your other libertys are bound up)." The moderate Puritan minister William Hubbard (1621-1704) was a rival of the firebrand conservative Increase Mather, whose sermon on the sinfulness of the Massachusetts colony, "The Wicked Man's Portion" (1675), was the first text printed by Foster's Boston press. According to ANB, Hubbard's election day sermon "contended that the religious and social changes besetting New England, while disturbing, were not unique omens of impending doom. Rather, they were just the latest expressions of the adversity Christians always had to counter when facing the temptations of prosperity. Similarly, he rejected Mather's portrait of the colony's youth, the 'rising generation,' as morally degenerate. He argued that there were abundant signs of moral regeneration among Puritan youth that offered true hope for the future. Hubbard's was a more rational, tolerant view of human nature and social change." Hubbard here uses biblical and historical examples to encourage "the regular, conscientious proceeding in this business of Election," by which men "have the liberty to choose their own rulers." Printing in colonial Massachusetts had been confined by law to Cambridge until that privilege was rescinded in 1674. Cambridge printer Marmaduke Johnson planned to open a workshop in Boston, but died in December of that year. Harvard graduate John Foster (1648-81) purchased Johnson's printing press and set up shop in Boston in the spring of 1675. Foster had enjoyed wood engraving as a hobby in college, and he added woodcuts to the repertory of his press. He produced the first map printed in America for Hubbard's "A Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians in New-England" (1677), in addition to publishing the first American book written by a woman, Anne Bradstreet's "Several Poems Compiled with a Great Variety of Wit and Learning" (1678), and the first medical book printed in the colonies, Thomas Thatcher's "A Brief Rule to Guide the Common People of New England How to Order Themselves and Theirs in the Small Pocks, or Measles" (1677). Hubbard's "Happiness" is rare at auction, with just three other copies recorded by RBH since 1961, two of them lacking leaves or with text supplied in facsimile. The third (complete) copy fetched $8,400 at Christie's in 2005..