Two years ago the Library Company of Philadelphia acquired the Michael Zinman Collection, over 7,800 books, pamphlets, and broadsides printed in America before 1801. With this acquisition the Library Company became the second largest repository of early American imprints, larger even than the Library of Congress. At the time Mr. Zinman promised to continue to donate materials to the collection as they came on the market, and he has stood by his word. This month he deposited in the Library a book as remarkable as any he has ever acquired. It is a volume of eight early New England sermons, most of them known in only one or two other copies, all in remarkably fresh condition. The photograph to the left shows how they are bound together in a homemade wrapper inscribed by Sarah Foxcroft, probably the sister of Rev. Thomas Foxcroft (1697-1769) of Boston's First Church, the most prominent divine of his generation.
The plain brown paper wrapper was evidently first used by Foxcroft to cover his copy of Cotton Mather's tract Vital Christianity (Boston, 1741), judging by the manuscript title on the back of the volume, upside down. The tract in still there in the middle of the volume, with Foxcroft's name on the title page. Vital Christianity was first published in Philadelphia in 1725, a fact that is noted in manuscript by Foxcroft on the title page. (See the photograph, and note the original blue paper wrapper of the preceding sermon in the volume.) It was an attempt to reconcile the Friends' doctrine of the Inner Light with Puritan orthodoxy. It was reprinted at the height of the Great Awakening as a similar olive branch to the followers of George Whitefield. Since Foxcroft in other ways tried to mediate in the controversies surrounding his preaching, his ownership of the 1741 edition suggests that he may have had a hand in its reprinting.
Sarah Foxcroft later reused the wrapper to cover seven more sermons that she stitched together with string. This must have been one of several volumes she put together in this way, since above her name on the cover is written "No. 19." The others have apparently not survived intact, undoubtedly either disbound for individual sale to collectors or rebound in some more durable form. The survival of this one volume exactly as she left it in the mid-18th century is nothing short of a miracle, and it provides important evidence of how readers, especially pious women, preserved for future re-reading some of the many pamphlet sermons that were given to them.
Six of the eight pamphlets are by Cotton Mather, who was Foxcroft's close friend and mentor. One of them -- his Rules of a Visit (Boston, 1705) -- is still in its original wallpaper wrapper, with a presentation in Mather's hand "To Mr. Belcher," probably Jonathan Belcher, later Governor of Massachusetts. (The photograph to the left shows the wallpaper facing the next pamphlet in the volume, a sermon of the same year by Solomon Stoddard.)
