An Easy and Compendious System of Short-Hand; Adapted to the Arts and Sciences, and to the Learned Professions. For the Use of Schools

Philadelphia: T. Lang; T. Dobson, 1792. Very Good-. Philadelphia, PA: Printed by T. Lang; Sold by T. Dobson, 1792. First Thus, "Abstracted from the Larger Edition." 12mo (15cm); original blue stitched wrappers; 21,[1]pp.; portrait frontispiece of Thomas Gurney and nine leaves of copperplates numbered I-X, plate IX omitted as usual. Collated complete. Wrappers rather worn and spine perished, ghost of original label to upper cover, brief soil to textblock, else contents sound. Contemporary ownership signature to title page. Good to Very Good. Publisher's ads printed on p. [22].

Exceptionally uncommon school edition adapted from Thomas Gurney's 1750 treatise Brachygraphy, or Short-Writing Made Easy to the Meanest Capacity. The work went through nearly twenty editions in the next hundred years, including this, itself a distillation of Sarjeant's 1789 edition, brought down from 46 to 21 pages. The system's most famous practitioner was arguably Charles Dickens, who used it while a court reporter in his younger years, describing the intensely laborious process of mastering this convoluted "Egyptian temple" in his novel David Copperfield (see Gurney's entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography).

Evans 24370; Rink (Technical Americana) 1978; Sabin 77059. This edition missed by Westby-Gibson's Bibliography of Shorthand.