THE IMITATION OF CHRIST IN THREE BOOKS:

Nathan Kite. Good. 1833 first edition thus, Nathan Kite (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), 3 7/8 x 5 7/8 inches tall full leather bound, gilt lettered black leather label to spine, 211 pp. Very slight soiling and slight to moderate rubbing and edgewear to covers, with a bit of bumping to all four tips. 1847 prior owner name to blank front free-endpaper, with soiling and an ink stain to the subsequent blank front free-endpaper. Light to moderate scattered foxing throughout. Otherwise, apart from a couple of pages with creased tips, a very good copy - clean and unmarked - of this scarce early Philadelphia issue of a beloved Christian devotional work. OCLC (No. 11689841) locates only two copies of this imprint at institutions worldwide - one at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and one at the State University of New York at Buffalo. ~KM5~ [1.0P] An early American edition of the popular 1785 John Payne translation of the Imitation of Christ (Copinger, 'On the English Translations of the Imitatio Christi' (1900), pp. 84-87). In the first paragraph of his lengthy preface, Payne explains that he hoped in this translation to do 'some justice to the sense of the Original; which is almost lost in the loose paraphrase of Dean Stanhope,' referring to Anglican George Stanhope's often reprinted 1698 English translation. However, Payne's translation uses the King James Version wording for scriptural quotations within the work, rather than the Vulgate edition of the Bible available to a Kempis in the fifteenth century. And Payne has edited out much from the original which he found overly 'monkish' or 'popish,' including all of Book 4, dealing with the (Roman Catholic) Mass. The Imitation was written by Catholic monk Thomas Kempis (circa 1380-1471), as four separate books completed between 1420 and 1427, at Mount Saint Agnes monastery, in the town of Windesheim, located in what is now the Netherlands.