595J  R.B. (Anon)

Extraordinary adventures, revolutions & events. Being An Account of divers Stupendious Accidents, Strange Deliverances; Signal Mutations in the Fortunes of several famous Men; and Changes of Government in many Countries. With other Observable Passages in divers Kingdoms, States and Provinces throughout the World. Enlivened with pictures, for their better illustration. By R. B.

London : printed for Nath. Crouch, at the Bell over-against Grocers-Alley, in the Poultry, near Cheapside, 1704.         Price  $1,200

Interior view of a historic book titled 'Extraordinary Adventures, Revolutions & Events' showing the title page and a woodcut illustration depicting a scene with a figure in an iron cage.

Duodecimo;  14  x. 8.5 cm signatures:  A-H¹². Type changes to a smaller typeface, p. 183-187. Publisher’s ads [5] p. at end.  With woodcut frontice piece and three full page woodcuts. The third edition. R. B. = R. Burton, i.e. the pseudonym of Nathaniel Crouch.  With an additional engraved title page. this copy is bound in full modern calf.

Side view of a vintage book titled 'Burton Extraordinary Adventures 1704', featuring a dark leather cover with gold detailing and a spine label.

“The entertaining and useful works of that almost universal and popular historiographer, Robert Burton, who published in the latter end of the last and beginning of the present Century, being out of print and very scarce, it would be doing to the public, and especially to young persons, a real service, if they were all reprinted and preserved from oblivion.” *

An interesting development in this book is that Crouch has included rather coarse bibliographic attributions after each passage, i.e. “Heylins Cosmog. pag. 626”

It is curious that, although Crouch was in the trade, the first of his books with the pseudonym of “R. B.” was issued by a brother publisher.”* 

*Book-lore: A Magazine Devoted to Old Time Literature, Volume 1 London Elliot Stock, 1885

Misfortunes, magic tricks, scientific discoveries, natural oddities, miraculous recoveries abound. This is a dense book with small type and every page holds a few detailed tales of mankind.  This book is a fun and entertaining gossipy collection of Extraordinary Adventures, Revolutions and events &c. It covers the explorations of Columbus, Pizarro, Almagro, and other Spaniards, as well as the establishment of the English Empire in America. Explorers and merchant adventurers, missionaries taken prisoners, ship wrecks, murders followed by almost ethnographic descriptions of governments and kingdoms.  

English Short Title Catalog, T71200. 

Woodcut illustration depicting scenes of revolutions and events, featuring figures in a mountainous landscape, buildings, and a person playing a flute in the foreground.

Copies in North America:   Indiana University, Princeton, McMaster U,   U. of North Carolina,  U. of Texas at Austin,  U. of Toronto.

https://datb.cerl.org/estc/T71200

A historical woodcut illustration depicting a chaotic scene of a public execution with soldiers and crowds, capturing the essence of revolutions and events.