Alright, so I'm not officially blogging at work yet, but I'm just so excited by this particular item that I'm jumping the gun.
Mary : a fiction
[Wollstonecraft, Mary, 1759-1797]
London : Printed for J. Johnson, St. Paul's Church-Yard, MDCCLXXXVIII [1788]
This is the first edition of Mary Wollstonecraft's first and only novel before she went on to write A Vindication on the Rights of Women. Wikipedia calls this novel "an important development in the history of the novel because it helped shape an emerging feminist discourse." In checking the catalog for a Wollstonecraft bibliography, I came upon John Windle's Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin 1759-1797, which is a very nice and detailed bibliography, complete with transcriptions, collational formulas, and title-page facsimiles. Our copy is, sadly lacking the half-title, which Windle says is "required", but it does have the manuscript "correction" on page 178. I'm not positive whether or not a copy without the half-title is of a different edition, etc. but it seems as though the manuscript point would still indicate the first edition. Either way, I think this is pretty sweet, so sue me.
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