PALMER, Thomas

An Essay of the Meanes how to make our Travailes...

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H.L. for Mathew Lownes, London, 1606. Small quarto, [8], 13 pp., engraved title vignette and headpieces, four folding tables; some margins cut close affecting some text, headlines, or catchwords, but a very good copy, disbound, in cloth chemise with half morocco box. First edition of this notably early English work on the benefits of distant travel.

Thomas Palmer, "the Travailer", was appointed High Sheriff of Kent in 1595. The following year he accompanied the Allied expedition to Cadiz under Lord Howard, and was knighted. Very much a product of his times, Palmer published his Essay at the end of the Elizabethan period, when it was widely accepted throughout all ranks of society - from the courtier to the common sailor - that foreign travel was a duty to the State.

Travel had become the fashion among men of rank as a way of learning European languages and modern history, and acquiring the necessary physical accomplishments and social graces for a young man to make his way at Court. In this sense, Elizabethan and Jacobean travel was the origin of the Grand Tour.

There was also an economic and political imperative to foreign travel, and Palmer discusses these benefits, which were appreciable in these years of English expansionism in America, where the first settlers had been sent to open the way for a great colonial empire. Indeed Palmer makes several references to America, with notes on the customs and manners of the native inhabitants.

Palmer's elaborate tables outlining the reasons for travel, the type of person who undertakes travel, and sensible travel advice, are borrowed directly from Theodor Zwinger's Methodus apodemia, which was published in 1577. Palmer evidently translated this lengthy thesis and liberally drew from it to formulate his own Essay.

Palmer's Essay was noted by Rosenbach as 'exceedingly rare'. This is the Marquis of Lothian's copy, sold at Anderson Galleries in 1932.
Cox, II, p. 322; DNB, XV, pp.161-62; JCB, (2)III:41; STC, 19156.

• AUD 14,000.00 > otras divisas
• nº de pedido: 602_387

• librero: Hordern House (AUSTRALIA)