Posthumous Works of Mr. John Locke (1706)This collection of writings by notable Enlightenment philos
Posthumous Works of Mr. John Locke (1706)This collection of writings by notable Enlightenment philosopher John Locke contains a number of interesting (and fairly common) marks of use, in the hand of former owner John Shadwell.Early books were not usually printed with indexes, so many owners added their own, often on one of the flyleaves at the front or back of the book. This volume features one such handwritten index—a list of subjects discussed in the first part of the work—alphabetized and with references to page numbers as in today’s printed books.But no index is ever really exhaustive, and an owner’s decisions about what to include can reveal a lot about what he thought was important in the text. Creating an alphabetized index (even a short one like this) is also a time consuming affair, and requires a great deal of familiarity with the work. Such an index is a testament to the importance of this book to its previous owner.Our former owner has also added a handwritten list of other works by the author (he was evidently a big John Locke fan), and started to define certain key concepts in the book—although he seems to have stopped after providing Locke’s definitions of “a miracle” and “a spectator.” http://catalog.lib.msu.edu/record=b1158883~S39a~Andrew -- source link
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