[TERRES AUSTRALES] JESUITS. La Rédacteur véridique. 24
Duodecimo, 71 pp., very good, untrimmed, in attractive contemporary marbled paper wrappers. [probably Paris], Àlethopolis, dans les Terres Australes, 1762.
“Dans les Terres Australes…”
Rare: one of a small but intriguing number of eighteenth-century books to use a bogus Pacific imprint to avoid prosecution and lend an air of exotic glamour. The work is the first edition of an anonymous Jesuit defence against the French suppression of the order, with an imprint prudently concealed in the lands of the southern oceans. It consists of a point for point refutation of the official case put against the Jesuits in 1762. The use of phoney Australasian imprints would make an interesting study. The most obvious that springs to mind is one of the poetic attacks on Sir Joseph Banks and his liaisons in Tahiti, which sports the imprint Batavia “for Jacobus Opano” (An Epistle from Mr. Banks), while another is the strange Omai fantasy by the Graf von Dyrhn, Beylage zu dem Jahre 2240, published in “Kokos”, by the grand-ducal Australian Printer in 1781. $975