PHILLIPS, Sir Richard

Twelve Essays on the Proximate Causes of the Material Phenomena of the Universe; With Illustrative Notes

London: J & C Adlard, 1821. First Edition. Octavo. 21cm. Later black institutional cloth titled in gilt to spine. [xii]; 458pp.; [viii] index, notes, and errata to rear. Clean and bright cloth with bright gilt and negligible wear; internally clean, some toning and spotting to prelims and plates, a little thumbing in places, fore-edge untrimmed, offsetting from some of the folding plates. A very good, solid and clean copy.

A most unusual assemblage from the rather bizarre and overlooked Sir Richard Phillips; by turns teacher, author, magazine publisher, vegetarian and animal rights activist, vigorous (if erratic) political reformer; he was Sheriff of London in 1807 when he took it upon himself to order the whitewashing of Newgate Prison for hygiene reasons, an occasional bankrupt, amateur scientist, advocate for the freedom of the Press, bookdealer, and radical political prisoner imprisoned in 1792 for selling banned copies of Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man" out of his bookshop in Leicester.
A fascinating man; staunchly vegetarian from the age of 9 when he inadvertently wandered into an 18th century slaughterhouse, a worker towards education reform, he believed that learning by rote from the sages of antiquity made people dumber rather than smarter, and favored a more interrogative and creativity based approach.
By 1810 Phillips was a quite wealthy and successful publisher and bookseller; he lost an enormous amount of stock and revenue after the fire at Gillet's printers (the same printer who 10 years later would be running hack jobs for Henry Colburn, a man with whom Phillips had a number of things in common), which wiped out a significant portion of his holdings and forced a retrenchment.
Phillips rose once again to professional and financial prominence, but was virtually wiped out in the Bank Panic of 1837.
Prior to his decline Phillips had set up and run the Monthly Magazine, dedicated to a spectrum of reformative topics, and which gave him a broad canvas upon which to expand his theories on...well, everything.
This collection of essays, with folding illustrative plates and problems for the reader to attempt solving, seems dedicated to upending the conventional wisdom regarding things like The Tides, and Gravity, and other fundamental building blocks of human understanding. Among other eccentricities Phillips seems to have held quite a low opinion of Sir Isaac Newton. He stops well short of Flat Earth (he's eccentric, not oblivious) but there is a case to be made for Phillips being a grandfather figure for the Alternative Science/History/Conspiracy Truthseeker movements. Scarce in institutions (6 copies on OCLC), and highly elusive in trade.

Price: $500.00

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