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"By a Searcher After Truth" : THE RAPPERS: OR, THE MYSTERIES, FALLACIES, AND ABSURDITIES OF SPIRIT-RAPPING, TABLE-TIPPING, AND ENTRANCEMENT

New York: H. Long & Brother, 1854

No Date [1854] 1st edition. Original Green Cloth with embossed gilt illustrated front board & spine Small 8vo, [i]-x, [11]-282 pages; with 6 pages of undated ads. Includes 2 dramatic frontispieces separated by a tissue guard, one shows “casting out the evil spirits,” the other shows “table tipping” (reproduced in gilt on the front cover), both with attractive young women at the center. Published just 6 years after the founding of the Spritualist movement in America. “Spiritualists often set March 31, 1848, as the beginning of their movement. On that date, Kate and Margaret Fox, of Hydesville, New York, reported that they had made contact with a spirit that was later claimed to be the spirit of a murdered peddler whose body was found in the house, though no record of such a person was ever found. The spirit was said to have communicated through rapping noises, audible to onlookers. The evidence of the senses appealed to practically-minded Americans, and the Fox sisters became a sensation….many early participants in Spiritualism were radical Quakers and others involved in the mid-nineteenth-century reforming movement. These reformers were uncomfortable with more prominent churches because those churches did little to fight slavery and even less to advance the cause of women's rights. Such links with reform movements, often radically socialist, had already been prepared in the 1840s, as the example of Andrew Jackson Davis shows. After 1848, many socialists became ardent spiritualists or occultists. Socialist ideas, especially in the Fourierist vein, exerted a decisive influence on Kardec and other Spiritists” (Wikipedia). Only one copy has appeared at a major auction house in the last 100 years. OCLC: 504493987. OCLC lists only 1 copy worldwide (British Library). Rear board also attractively embossed. Spine sunned, occasional light foxing. Very Good Condition. An excellent attractive copy of this exceedingly rare book. (AC-22-20)

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