The Top Ten Books of 1709 Posted by Jill Lepore

December 7, 2009
The Top Ten Books of 1709 Posted by Jill Lepore

dw030.jpgSomething north of a hundred and fifty thousand books were published in 2009. That number daunted me, so I got to thinking of a year, three centuries ago, when, in all of the British mainland colonies, only thirty-one books were printed (if you discount a handful of broadsheets, proclamations, and volumes of laws). The pickings are slim—and grim—but here are my Top Ten Books of 1709:

1. Daniel Leeds. "The American Almanack." All but three books published in 1709 were religious tracts, printed in Boston, and nearly all of them have to do with the day of judgment. Leeds's almanac, printed in New York, is the only truly secular publication of the year, which fact alone makes it a stand out. It also boasts some wonderfully bad doggerel: "His neighbours Horse that over his fence doth neigh / Will make his owner, for's presumption, pay." At least the horse isn't dead.

2. Thomas Doolittle. "A Prospect of Eternity." For its cheering message about the importance of "weaning our hearts of this world."

3. "An Appeal of Some of the Unlearned." An anonymous response to a treatise called "An Appeal to the Learned." There were no book reviews in 1709 (the book review was invented around 1750) and this exchange is as close as American letters gets, that year, to a back-and-forth. It's not as cheeky as it sounds, though; the debate was theological, and the unlearned demurred: "we are not Contentious. We only Enquire."

4. Cotton Mather. "The Cure for Sorrow." Nine of the books printed in 1709 were written by Mather, a Boston minister, and two more by his father, Increase, who was, at the time, the president of Harvard College, which makes it hard to leave them off the list. Their literary efforts account for more than a third of the year's books. This one has got the best subtitle: "An Essay Directing Persons under Sadness What Course to take, that they may be no more Sad."

5. Increase Mather. "Solemn Advice to Young Men Not to Walk in the Wayes of Their Heart and in Sight of Their Eyes; but to remember the Day of Judgment." The most popular book of 1709, it was already in its second edition, and saw a third before the year was out.

6. John Fox. "The Door of Heaven Open and Shut." Fox, a lesser Doolittle, in my view, was better known for his earlier treatise, "Time and the End of Time," which his Boston printer hawked on the title page (as in, "Fox, author of the bestselling End of Time!").

7. Cotton Mather. "The Golden Curb for the Mouth." A sermon against swearing: "O Sottish and Monstrous Impiety!"

8. Bathsheba Bowers. "An Alarm Sounded to Prepare the Inhabitants of the World to Meet the Lord in the Way of His Judgments." The only book that year written by a woman, it's twenty-two pages long, and Bowers spends a good three of them apologizing for having written it.

9. "The Massachusetts Psalter." A book of psalms, translated into Algonquian, and set into type by a Nipmuck Indian named James Printer, whose printer's fonts were, last year, discovered during an archaeological dig in Harvard Yard.

10. I'm holding this place for Benjamin Franklin, who was born in Boston in 1706, began his apprenticeship at his brother's print shop in 1718, and became the scourge of the Mathers three years later, when he broke upon the literary stage in the guise of a fictional character whose name was a parody of two of Cotton Mather's more dreadful sermons, "Silentiarius" and "Essays to Do Good." In 1721, the sixteen-year-old Franklin, who would help topple the Puritan theocracy and change the course of American letters forever, by making our books better, introduced himself to the world:


I am courteous and affable, good humour'd (unless I am first provok'd,) and handsome, and sometimes witty, but always, Sir, Your Friend and Humble Servant, SILENCE DOGOOD.
The Top Ten Books of 1709: The Book Bench : The New Yorker (26 December 2009)
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2009/12/the-top-ten-books-of-1709.html
http://snipurl.com/tv7bn