A Compendium of the Travels of Mr. Hanway, Sir John Mandeville. And Mr. Lionel Wafer, and a Description of Greenland

Dublin: Printed for J. Smith, on the Blind Quay, 1757. 12mo, 170 x 101 mms., pp. [ii], 288, contemporary calf; spine creased and almost about to split, top and base of spine chipped; lacks plate, joints tender; bookplate of Alex M. MacEwen on front paste-down end-paper and contemporary name in ink on title-page, "Benholm", no doubt the settlement in Aberdeenshire, home to Benholm Mill, an area made famous among Scots by the work of that favourite Scottish national novelist Lewis Grassic Gibbon (1901-1935). Most of the volume is taken up with Hanway's travels, and some of Mandeville's more curious observations are repeated, e. g., in India: "Strong wine is likewise made there, which the women drink, but not the men; to the end, that the women may have beares, who yet are shave thought the men are not." The surgeon Lionel Wafer (d. 1705) published his A New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America in 1699, and the excerpts in thsi "compendium" are taken from that publication.This copy is remarkable for having what appears to be the unidentified bookplate of the first leader of the Scottish National Party: Sir Alexander Malcolm MacEwen (1875-1941). Earlier in his career, he had been a leading Scottish solicitor and Provost of Inverness, after having schooled at Clifton College and the University of Edinburgh. He authored influential works on the present and future of Scotland, and on world-historical politics, including The Thistle and the Rose: Scotland's Problem To-Day (1932), Scotland at School: Education for Citizenship (1938), and Towards Freedom (1938). Surely the motto "Libro pellite curas" on his bookplate is a witty pun on the Horace he likely learned at Clifton or the University of Edinburgh: "Vino pellite curas". Rather than the Horatian approach, "Drive your cares away with wine", MacEwen's motto suggests, "Drive your cares away with book/s". The ESTC finds only one book fitted with the bookplate of "Alex. M. MacEwen", a copy of the 1768 Edinburgh edition of James Thomson's classic Scottish poem The Seasons, held by the University of Virginia. Smith published several of these compendiums, with completely different content by completely different authors; this one is very rare, with ESTC N27822 locating only one copy in the British Isles (British Library), three copies in North America (NYPL, University of Florida, and University of Iowa), and only one copy elsewhere (the Czartoryski Library in Poland).