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Fourth edition, Harford issue, folio, pp. [436]; collating pi A a? b A-3F?; lexicon in double column, 4 pages of ads at rear, engraved frontispiece showing portraits of ten scholars and two vignette views of Oxford and Cambridge; full contemporary paneled calf rubbed and worn, neatly rebacked in tan calf gilt, short cracks beginning at the top of the front joint. Bookplate of Stoughton R. Vogel, M.D., a Philadelphia physician. The rarer of two 1678 issues, with the Harford imprint. "Two years after Blount's Glossographia in 1658, Edward Phillips' A New World of Words appeared in the first folio edition of any English dictionary. Although Phillips, who was Milton's nephew, gave no credit to Blount and even publicly disparaged him, his dictionary is a close copy of Blount's, with a number of encyclopedic entries added. Blount, enraged, published A World of Errors Discovered in the New World of Words (1673), in which he attacked Phillips and catalogued numerous mistakes. However, in spite of the unscrupulous character of the work, The New World of Words did initiate several ideas. Phillips included a long list of prominent specialists and gave the impression that they had contributed to or approved certain definitions, a claim that Blount disputed. Nonetheless, the idea of enlisting the support of specialists was a new one in English lexicography" (see Landau, p. 43). Among the specialists listed are Robert Boyle (chemistry), John Evelyn (agriculture), Henry Phillips (navigation), Elias Ashmole (heraldry), William Faithorn and W. Hollar (engraving & etching), and Coll. Venables and Isaac Walton (angling). Alston V, 58; Wing P2072A; Graesse V, 268.
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