1819 ADONIRAM JUDSON. Treatise on Baptism in Reply to Adoniram Judson. Fascinating Binding

Very scarce with no copies on the market. Adoniram Judson was already a hero before he left for the mission field in association with the Congregational church. When he became convinced of believer's baptism, was immersed, and professed himself a Baptist, well, that was trouble. The present is the official response of the Congregational church, by one of its most influential divines, responding to the reasons given by Judson for joining in with the immersers.

Already scarce, a really fascinating little curiosity about this example is the binding. In simple, early American quarter leather, the patterned boards are printed over original print sheets for another book. That book? Well, oddly enough it is pages for "Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure" by John Cleland. It was a notorious book, perhaps the most-banned novel in history and considered the first pornographic book ever to use the form of a novel, though entirely in the form of euphemism. Just an oddity that its pages would get overprinted and used to bind an important theological book, evidently by the printer or perhaps a slightly later binder used the sheets that had been salvaged from the illegal edition of Holmes, from which these likely came. This would have been the first American edition published by Peter Holmes, who was then convicted for printing a lewd and obscene novel. 

Pond, Enoch. A Treatise on the Mode and Subjects of Christian Baptism. In Two Parts. Designed as Reply to the Statements and Reasons of the Rev. Adoniram Judson as Exhibited in his "Sermon, Preached in the Lal Bazar Chapel, Calcutta, on Lord's-Day, September 27, 1812," and Recently Republished in this Country. Second Edition. Revised and Improved. Worcester. William Manning. February, 1819. 151pp.

Very solid in quarter leather, patterned paper over boards, chipped at extermities, some tide marks across text, but generally very solid and clean.