Author: MILTON (John):
Title: Paradise Lost A Poem in Twelve Books. With a Biographical and Critical Account of the Author and his Writings.
Description: Kilmarnock: Printed by J. Wilson, Bookseller. 1785. FIRST KILMARNOCK EDITION. 12mo (in 6s), 162 x 96 mms., pp. xviii, [19 - 21], 22 - 304, recently rebound in quarter calf, marbled boards, red leather label; a very good copy. The life is by Elijah Fenton, followed by "In Paradisu Admissam Summi Poetae Johannis Miltoni," a poem in Latin by Samuel Barrow, M. D. (?1625 - 1683). Barrow's verses were first printed in the second edition of Paradise Lost (1674), while Fenton's life was first published in 1725. The printer, John Wilson, would go on to publish the first edition of Burns's poems in Kilmarnock in 1786, and he reprinted Paradise Lost in 1789. Professor Patrick Scott writes "That same year, 1785, Wilson published his first literary title, again a reprint of a standard work in regular demand. This was his small-format edition of John Milton's Paradise Lost, first published in 1667, and one of the titles the London booksellers had tried in vain to protect from Donaldson and the Scottish reprinters. While we don't know that Burns bought his copy from Wilson, we do know he read Milton in this kind of small-format reprint; on June 18, 1787, Burns wrote to his friend William Nicol that he had "bought a pocket Milton, which I carry perpetually about with me" (Letters, ed. Roy, I: 123). Milton's Paradise Lost proved to be Wilson's most popular publication, being reprinted once more at Kilmarnock in 1789, and then twice more after the press moved to Ayr, in 1791 and 1795. In this period, before the invention of stereotype plates, each new reprint required the complete resetting of all 300 pages of type" (Electric Scotland - online).

Keywords: poetry printing history literature Scottish Enlightenment


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