Title: A Dialogue Between A Japonese and A Formosan, About some Points of The Religion of the Time. By G. P---m-----r. ----------Quid rides-------Fabula------
Description: <p class="marcline" style="margin:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;background:#FFFFFF;"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;color:rgb(33,37,41);">8vo. pp. [8], 41, [3]. Signatures: A-F4 G2. </span><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;">Marbled boards.
Blue/green marks on edges. <span class="marclinepart"><span style="color:#212529;">At
end, pp. [42]-[44]: "Books printed for Bernard Lintott at the Cross-Keys
near temple-Bar".</span></span></span></p><p></p>

<p class="marcline" style="margin:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;background:#FFFFFF;"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></p>

<p class="marcline" style="margin:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;background:#FFFFFF;"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;">First
edition of this work by the mysterious French refugee ‘George Psalmanazar’ (his
true name has never been discovered), who claimed to be a native of the
then-unfamiliar island of Formosa, and took English readership by storm with
his almost entirely imaginative History of Formosa (1704, revised in 1705 with
the addition of lurid cannibal details: see Bib# 552132/Fr# 666 and Bib#
1855507/Fr# 667 in this collection). For the benefit of ‘philosophical’ interrogators
like Edmond Halley and Richard Mead he published the present work. His
invention of a Formosan language and alphabet led to a ‘Formosan’ version of
the Lord’s Prayer, among other exotics in the engraved Oratio Dominica of 1713
(Bib# 4103158/Fr# 670); and his alleged conversations with inquisitive ladies,
involving ‘several curious particulars not in his book’, found a home in
Richard Gwinnett’s novelistic memoir Pylades and Corinna, 1731-32 (Bib#
4103159/Fr# 671). Never wholly dismissed in his time as an impostor,
Psalmanazar went on to a busy, if underpaid career as a London publisher’s
hack, completing Samuel Palmer’s General History of Printing, 1732 (Bib#
1918752/Fr# 672) – which, perhaps not coincidentally, contains a description of
a ‘newly discover’d’ Gutenberg publication of Strassburg, 1458, in reality a
forged imprint tacked on to a 1472 Eggestein edition of St Gregory – and
providing Emanuel Bowen with no fewer than thirty anonymous articles toward his
massive Complete System of Geography (1747; see Bib# 4103162/Fr# 674 for the
appropriate extracts, in which Psalmanazar confessed for the first time to his
impostures). His final confession, Memoirs of ****, Commonly Known by the Name
of George Psalmanazar (1764, Bib# 411093/Fr# 669), was published posthumously
by his widow, and while sufficiently contrite, preserves the mystery of his own
origins and true name, and promulgates many further suspect details.</span></p><p></p>

<p class="marcline" style="margin:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;background:#FFFFFF;"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></p>

<p class="marcline" style="margin:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;background:#FFFFFF;"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;">See
also F. J. Foley, The great Formosan impostor. St Louis, 1968, pp. 40-41, 56;
English Short Title Catalogue Online, <span class="marclinepart"><span style="color:rgb(33,37,41);">T139486; </span></span>A. Freeman, “Hoax
and Forgery, Whimsy and Fraud: Taxonomic Reflections on the Bibliotheca
Fictiva,” in W. Stephens &amp; E. Havens (eds.), <span class="marclinepart"><span style="color:#212529;">Literary forgery in early
modern Europe, 1450-1800, </span><span style="color:rgb(33,37,41);">Baltimore,
</span><span style="color:#212529;">2018, 23-24.</span></span></span></p><p></p>

<p class="marcline" style="margin:0in;margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;background:#FFFFFF;"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></p>

<span style="font-size:11.5pt;line-height:107%;font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="https://catalyst.library.jhu.edu/catalog/bib_4103163" rel="ugc nofollow"><span style="color:#4B64FF;background:#FFFFFF;">Click here to view the Johns Hopkins
University catalog record.</span></a></span>