
Luke Batterham
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A PUBLISHING RECEIPT SIGNED BY JOSEPH PRIESTLEY, the English discoverer of Oxygen, supporter of the French and American Revolutions, dissenting minister, and – in Coleridge's phrase – 'Patriot, and Saint, and Sage'; ending his days as a refugee in the United States. Joseph Johnson, to whom this receipt is made out, was a close friend who converted to Priestley's Unitarian views and published practically all his works from the 1760s onwards.
Priestley during this period was an enormously prolific author, even if documents or letters by him are inversely hard to come by (ABPC listing only eleven letters and the present docket as having been sold since 1978). Among books which Johnson published for him in 1770 are: A Familiar Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Perspective (thought to contain the first mention of rubber erasers, Priestley noting that he had 'seen a substance excellently adapted to the purpose of wiping from paper the marks of a black-lead-pencil'); A Free Address to Protestant Dissenters on the subject of Church Discipline; A Letter to the Author of the Protestant Dissenter's Answer to the Free Address on the subject of the Lord's Supper; Letters to the Author of 'Remarks on several late Publications relative to the Dissenters, in a Letter to Dr. Priestley' (written with William Enfield); An Appeal to the Serious and Candid Professors of Christianity (this supplement to the Unitarian Edward Elwall's account of his trial was among Priestley's most popular works, 30,000 copies being circulated by 1787); and, it seems, several others; not to mention second editions such as those of: A Serious Address to Masters of Families with Forms of Family-Prayer or A Description of a New Chart of History, Containing a View of the Principal Revolutions of Empire, That Have Taken Place in the World.