An Epistle to Zenas 1786 Gardiner, Peter Edes. This small book is titled “An Epistle To Zenas” and it’s a satire in verse directed at James Sullivan, who became Governor of Massachusetts in 1807 and died a year later. The book is attributed to John Sylvester John Gardiner and was printed by Peter Edes in Boston in 1786. Peter Edes (1756 - 1840) was an American patriot and an advocate of American independence before and during the American Revolution, when he was arrested for his show of support for the patriots. He was also a printer who backed the American cause with his words; after the war, he moved his shop to Boston, then to Newport, Rhode Island, and later to Augusta, Maine, where he published the “Kennebec Intelligencer”, and eventually he settled in Hallowell, Maine. Edes was a printer’s apprentice to his father, Benjamin Edes, who printed the radical newspaper “The Boston Gazette, which was fundamental in instigating the Boston Tea Party and played a major role in rallying the cause for independence. Peter was arrested when he was only 19 by British General Thomas Gage just two days after the Battle of Bunker Hill; he had drawn attention to himself from British Regulars just by watching the Battle of Bunker Hill with "anxious and tearful eyes" for the American soldiers, according to his diary; his house was subsequently searched, where British forces discovered a cache of firearms, for which Peter received a jail sentence of one hundred and four days. While serving his sentence, he maintained his diary, which revealed the cruelty that prisoners were subjected to, and he was one of the participants at the Boston Tea Party two years earlier. John Sylvester John Gardiner (1765 - 1830) aka John S. J. Gardiner, was born in Wales in the UK, but spent much of his youth in the West Indies, where his father served as attorney-general for the British government. John was educated in Boston and England, and following the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War, he went back to England, only to return permanently to the United States in 1783. He studied law, but abandoned it to enter the ministry, he became an Episcopal priest and rector of Trinity Church in Boston, and he was a published author and one of the founders of the Boston Athenæum. James Sullivan (1744 - 1808) was an American lawyer and politician in Massachusetts. He was an associate justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, served as the state's attorney general for many years and as governor of the state from 1807 until his death. He was involved in drafting the state constitution and the state's ratifying convention for the United States Constitution. Born and raised in Berwick, Maine (then part of Massachusetts), Sullivan was an opponent of British colonial policies leading to the revolution. He was elected to the provincial assembly in 1774; when it first met in June, Sullivan was a leader in calling for a Continental Congress. At the time of his appointment to the bench, the position was seen as particularly risky, because it was clearly represented anti-British authority; he supported John Hancock and later Sam Adams for governor, and in 1787 he defended individuals charged with participating in Shays' Rebellion, an uprising in the rural parts of the state which had begun in 1786. This activity earned him criticism from stalwart pro-government members of the Massachusetts Bar, and we don’t know how Zenas was connected to James Sullivan, but Zenas is the only lawyer spoken of favorably in the Bible. (Zenas was a first-century Christian mentioned in Paul the Apostle's Epistle to Titus in the New Testament. His name is a shortened form of "Zenodoros", meaning "gift of Zeus”, and by tradition, he was often counted as one of the unnamed seventy disciples sent out by Jesus into the villages of Galilee, as mentioned in Luke 10:1-24.) Legal historian Charles Warren called Sullivan one of the most important legal figures of the time in Massachusetts. See Evans # 19662. (Charles Evans was an American librarian and bibliographer who compiled the “American Bibliography: A Chronological Dictionary of all Books, Pamphlets and Periodical Publications Printed in the United States of America from the Genesis of Printing in 1639 Down to and Including the Year 1820 with Bibliographical and Biographical Notes", and #19662 comes from Volume 7, which covers the years 1786 to 1789 in the set.) The book is disbound and inscribed “Jn. MGood May 11” and “By John S.J. Gardiner 1786” in pencil on the title page, followed by a two-page Preface (i - ii), eleven pages of text that are numbered through page15, and one leaf titled “Cerberus” at the end. There are also verse numbers in the margins that were provided by the printer. The book measures 6 x 4 1/4 in. wide, the margins are out of alignment, with some margins near the edges of the pages, there’s light soiling on the title page, light brown spots in the text and on the margins, the book is protected by a fold-over jacket housed in a protective slipcase with a partial paper label on the spine that reads “Gardiner An Epi”, and the top of the slipcase has lifted a little bit and that’s pretty much it. The book is rare - there are none listed on the rare book website we use, and we only found two other original books printed by Peter Edes, and they go for $1045 and $500. (If you want to know the titles, sit down to relax and take it all in - one was about the Boston Massacre - “Orations Delivered at the Request of the Inhabitants of the Town of Boston to Commemorate the Evening of the Fifth of March 1770, When a Number of Citizens Were Killed by a Party of British Troops, Quartered among them, in a Time of Peace”, printed by Edes in 1785, and the other was "The True End and Design of the Holy Sacrament of the Lord's Supper, Together with the Nature of the Preparation Necessary For a Right and Profitable Reception Thereof, Opened and Explained in Two Dialogues Between a Father and His Son," written by John Clowes and printed by Edes and S. Etheridge for B. Larkin in Boston in 1794.) #247 #4988