8vo. [2], 127pp, [1]. Bound by Kerr & Richardson of Glasgow in nineteenth-century brown morocco-backed marbled paper boards, lettered in gilt to spine. A trifle rubbed, corners bumped. Very occasional light spotting or marking, title trimmed at lower-edge. Book-label of J. R. P. Forrest to FEP.

The sole edition of English writer, trader, journalist, pamphleteer and spy Daniel Defoe's (1660?-1731) sweeping survey of the origins of writing, and more widely, of human communication from 'the two Tables of Stone, written by the Finger of God himself' which contained the 'Decalogue, or Ten Commandments', through the oral tradition, the traditions of the ancients - including woodcut examples of four antique alphabets, and handwriting, down to the early history of the printed book - including a survey of early continental printers and their various novel developments, in addition to relics of their work found in various significant libraries, including the Bodleian, and St. Benet's, Cambridge.

Very much an encomium on the significance and value of printing to the enlightenment, which 'may pass for the greatest Improvement of its Kind in the World', by one of its most prolific eighteenth-century practitioners, and a pioneer of the English novel, Defoe ends by neatly summing up the economic advantages of this valuable development:
'Had Writing only been the Way of Publishing in this Learned bookish Age, I believe I may venue to say, that Writing wou'd necessarily employ as many Hands as the Woollen Manufacture, and would as much have deserv'd the Name of a Manufacture; that is to say, upon a Supposition, that the Number of Books shou'd be as great, and the Itch of writing Books as strong as it is now'.

Although well represented institutionally, this ambitious survey of the history of human communication is rarely encountered in commerce; other than this copy, we can locate just two copies, both bound in volumes, in recent memory.