A Dialogue Between A Japonese and A Formosan, About some Points of The Religion of the Time. By G. P---m-----r. ----------Quid rides-------Fabula------

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A Dialogue Between A Japonese and A Formosan, About some Points of The Religion of the Time. By G. P---m-----r. ----------Quid rides-------Fabula------

George] (pseud.) [Psalmanazar

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A Dialogue Between A Japonese and A Formosan, About some Point...George] (pseud.) [Psalmanazar

George] (pseud.) [PsalmanazarPublished 1707

8vo. pp. [8], 41, [3]. Signatures: A-F4 G2. Marbled boards. Blue/green marks on edges. At end, pp. [42]-[44]: "Books printed for Bernard Lintott at the Cross-Keys near temple-Bar". First edition of this work by the mysterious French refugee ‘George Psalmanazar’ (his true name has never been discovered), who claimed to be a native of the then-unfamiliar island of Formosa, and took English readership by storm with his almost entirely imaginative History of Formosa (1704, revised in 1705 with the addition of lurid cannibal details: see Bib# 552132/Fr# 666 and Bib# 1855507/Fr# 667 in this collection). For the benefit of ‘philosophical’ interrogators like Edmond Halley and Richard Mead he published the present work. His invention of a Formosan language and alphabet led to a ‘Formosan’ version of the Lord’s Prayer, among other exotics in the engraved Oratio Dominica of 1713 (Bib# 4103158/Fr# 670); and his alleged conversations with inquisitive ladies, involving ‘several curious particulars not in his book’, found a home in Richard Gwinnett’s novelistic memoir Pylades and Corinna, 1731-32 (Bib# 4103159/Fr# 671). Never wholly dismissed in his time as an impostor, Psalmanazar went on to a busy, if underpaid career as a London publisher’s hack, completing Samuel Palmer’s General History of Printing, 1732 (Bib# 1918752/Fr# 672) – which, perhaps not coincidentally, contains a description of a ‘newly discover’d’ Gutenberg publication of Strassburg, 1458, in reality a forged imprint tacked on to a 1472 Eggestein edition of St Gregory – and providing Emanuel Bowen with no fewer than thirty anonymous articles toward his massive Complete System of Geography (1747; see Bib# 4103162/Fr# 674 for the appropriate extracts, in which Psalmanazar confessed for the first time to his impostures). His final confession, Memoirs of ****, Commonly Known by the Name of George Psalmanazar (1764, Bib# 411093/Fr# 669), was published posthumously by his widow, and while sufficiently contrite, preserves the mystery of his own origins and true name, and promulgates many further suspect details. See also F. J. Foley, The great Formosan impostor. St Louis, 1968, pp. 40-41, 56; English Short Title Catalogue Online, T139486; A. Freeman, “Hoax and Forgery, Whimsy and Fraud: Taxonomic Reflections on the Bibliotheca Fictiva,” in W. Stephens & E. Havens (eds.), Literary forgery in early modern Europe, 1450-1800, Baltimore, 2018, 23-24. <a href="https://catalyst.library.jhu.edu/catalog/bib_4103163" rel="ugc nofollow">Click here to view the Johns Hopkins University catalog record.</a>

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