Selden, Table-talk
Selden, Table-talk
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Selden, John. Table-talk. Being the discourses of John Selden, Esq., or his sence of various matters of weight and high consequence relating especially to religion and state. London, Printed for E. Smith 1689. 8°. [2] l., 60 p. Modern half-leather binding. Lowndes III, 2238. Waters, John Selden and his Table Talk, New York 1899. Wing S2437. – A very rare first edition. Numerous reprints have been published to this day. – „There is more weighty bullion sense in this book than I ever found in the same number of pages of any uninspired writer. O! to have been with Selden over his glass of wine, making every accident and outlet and a vehicle of wisdom“ (S. T. Coleridge). – Selden died in 1654 and Table-Talk was posthumous, compiled by Richard Milward, his secretary, from notes of Selden’s conversations. Milward probably completed his work before 1658 but publication was withheld until 1689, no doubt because much of it would have been offensive to the Stuart authorities, who had been overthrown in the revolution and exile of the previous year. Sir Frederick Pollock wrote of Table-Talk: „It is a book to be known … by everyone who makes any study of the political controversies of the Civil War and Commonwealth period or English political philosophy.“ In his Brief Lives 17th-century John Aubrey describes the writer: „He was very tall, I guess about six foot high; sharp oval face, head not very big, long nose inclining to one side, full popping eyes.“ Selden’s advice to book collectors is often quoted: „The giving the bookseller his price for his books has this advantage, he that will do so shall have the refusal of whatsoever comes to his hand, and so by this means gets many things which otherwise he never should have seen. So ’tis in giving a bawd her price. In buying books or other commodities, ’tis not always the best way to bid half so much as the seller asks: witness the country fellow that went to buy two [shove] groat shillings, they askt him three shillings, and he bid them eighteen pence.“ – The eminent English jurist and politician J. Selden (1584–1654) ‘played an important role in the deposition of the Duke of Buckingham. In Charles I’s Third Parliament, he was involved in drafting the Petition of Rights. When, in 1629, he joined other MPs in opposing the King’s illegal levies, he was imprisoned in the Tower for eight months and subsequently in Marshalsea Prison. He then retired to Bedfordshire as Steward to the Earl of Kent. In 1640, he represented the University of Oxford as a Member of Parliament for a university constituency in the Long Parliament. There he again found himself in opposition to the King, advocating, for example, the preservation of the Protestant faith and opposing the exclusion of bishops from the House of Lords. He was appointed Keeper of the Records and Rolls for the Tower’s archives and served on the parliamentary committee for the Admiralty.” (Wikipedia). – As is often the case, the engraved portrait is missing; the page margins are partly closely trimmed (minor loss of text in the colophons and pagination); there are slight wormholes in the top margin; slightly brown-stained in places; otherwise well preserved.
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