Letter 1549

Bagford informs Sloane that Mr Jonson has found a rare Latin book at an auction, resembling one he had seen at Cambridge. Jonson is on his way to show the book, which contains three volumes, to Sloane. The first volume includes a history of the revolutions and a legendary story about St John. The second is a collection of Bible stories. The third is called ‘ye Art of Dying’. John Bagford was a bookseller based in Holborn and dealt with some of the preeminent collectors of his day including Sloane, Samuel Pepys, Humfrey Wanley, and Thomas Hearne. He contributed to several works of scholarship and published an essay on the history of printing in the Philosophical Transactions (Theodor Harmsen, Bagford, John (1650/511716), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/1030, accessed 9 July 2013]).