An English expositor; or compleat dictionary teaching the interpretation of the hardest words, and the most useful terms of art, used in our language . now the ninth time revised, corrected and very much augmented . By a lover of the arts

12mo, collating A -M (lacking the blank leaf M12 as usual), text in double column; endpapers renewed, title tipped to front free endpaper, the whole worn and shaken; contemporary full calf, later red morocco label; the label chipped with loss, the spine cracking and becoming loose, a few spots and stains in the text and one or two short tears entering from the margins (no loss); overall, a fair copy, but the textblock is complete and generally clean. New cloth clamshell box. Ownership signature of D. T. Starnes (i.e. De Witt T. Starnes) at top of front pastedown, and the bookplate of Alfred Neobard Palmer (1847-1915), a chemist and local historian. He published several books concerning the local history of Wrexham and north Wales. See Starnes & Noyes, The English Dictionary from Cawdrey to Johnson, who devote the whole of chapter III to Bullokar's work, first published in 1616, the earliest obtainable dictionary of English, preceded only by Cawdrey's very rare A table alphabetical (1604, etc.): "It was with the significant revision in 1663, by A Lover of the Arts, that the real vogue of the Expositor began. Thereafter it was printed at least eleven times by 1731, the date of the last edition . The word list of the earlier Bullokar is greatly augmented; and two large new sections, the Index and the Nomenclator, are added. These new features owe their inception and much of their actual content, to a rival publication, The English Dictionarie, compiled by Henry Cockeram, and first published in 1623." The first of these, the Index Anglico-Latinus, is significant as it lays out in alphabetical form English (i.e. Anglo-Saxon) words with equivalents in "the more scholastick, or those derived from other (i.e. French and Latin) languages." Alston V, 18 (locating 4 copies, 2 in the US and one private); Kennedy 6194; Vancil, p. 38; Wing 5436. ESTC locates only the BL and University of Chicago copies.…