CURIOUS HIEROGLYPHICK BIBLE

A touchstone of eighteenth-century American book illustration, this "curious" children's Bible contains nearly five hundred woodcuts made by American artists. The most ambitious woodcut book produced in America up to that time, it is one of the sixty-five children's book titles produced by the pioneer publisher of children's literature and preeminent early American printer Isaiah Thomas (1749-1831), who had learned the art of engraving while apprenticed in his youth to the Boston printer Zechariah Fowle. Only four copies of this remarkable piece of early Americana exist today.