Dictionarium Domesticum.
Being a NEW and COMPLETE, Household Dictionary. For the Use both of CITY and COUNTRY. SHEWING, I. The whole Arts of Brewing, Baking, Cookery, and Piceling. Also Confectionary in its several Branches. II. The Management of the Kitchin, Pantry, Lar-der, Dairy, Olitory, and Poultry. With the proper Seasons for Flesh, Fowl and Fish. III. The Herdsman: Giving an Account of the Diseases of Cattle Poultry, &c. And the most approved Remedies for their Cure. IV. The English Vineyard; being the best Method of making English Wines and of Distilling most Kinds of Simple and Cordial Waters. V. The Apiary: Or, The Manner of Breeding, Hiving and managing of Bees. VI. The Family Physician and Herbalist: Containing the choicest Collection of Receipts for most Distempers, incident to Human Bodies, hitherto made Publick; with the Qualities and Uses of Physical Herbs and Plants of English Growth. (a long horizontal line). By N. BAILEY, Author of the Universal Etymological English Dictionary. (2 long horizontal lines). LONDON: Printed for C, Hitch at the Red Lion, and C. Davies, both in Pater-Noster Row; and S. Austen at the Angel and Bible, in St. Paul's Church-Yard. (a small horizontal line). M,DCC,XXX,V,I.
FIRST EDITION 1736. 8vo. 198 x 120 x 43mm. Inside cover with bookplate of Alan Davidson. 1fep. [1] Verso with engraved Frontispiece of five separate scenes domesticity. Cropped close at the bottom with no loss. Title page. [1] 2p Preface. 306 leaves 612 pages. Pages un-numbered but ordered alphabetically at the top of each page. 1fep. Bound in 19th century quarter calf and tips, with pebble cloth covers. The spine with gilt title, lines and simple tooled ornaments. Red speckled text-block edges. The feps stained without detracting. Internally very clean. All quite sound and VG.
- Although precise details of his birth and formative years are hard to find, it is well recorded that Nathan Bailey was an English philologist and lexicographer. He was the author of several dictionaries. He was a Seventh Day Baptist, admitted 1691 to a congregation in Whitechapel, London. Later he had a school at Stepney. Bailey, with John Kersey the younger, was a pioneer of English lexicography, and changed the scope of dictionaries to a greater comprehensivity. Up to the early eighteenth century, English dictionaries had generally focused on "hard words" and their explanation, for example those of Thomas Blount and Edward Phillips in the generation before. With a change of attention, to include more commonplace words and those not of direct interest to scholars, the number of headwords in English dictionaries increased spectacularly. Innovations were in the areas of common words, dialect, technical terms, and vulgarities. Bailey's An Universal Etymological English Dictionary, from its publication in 1721, became the most popular English dictionary of the 18th century, and went through nearly thirty editions. It was also the basis of English-German dictionaries. This copy here of Bailey's 'Dictionarium Domesticum,' 1736, is also a cookbook with recipes, including a rare one for fried chicken. The alphabetical ordering of the book is unusual, and the recipes are much more detailed than is the norm in other cookery books of the time. This gives it a greater importance than some of the other well-known 18th century cookery books. Nathan Bailey died June 27th, 1742, six years after Dictionarium Domesticum's publication.
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Antiquarian category
ref number:
11330