32mo. 40ff. Frontispiece portrait of King George III from a woodcut; half-page woodcut of John Rogers being burned at the stake; numerous small woodcuts illustrating the letters of the alphabet. The publisher, John Boyle, located to Marlborough Street in 1770, the year he produced this edition of the Primer - the first of seven he would publish during a career that spanned from 1769 to 1800. Charles Heartman, in his Bibliography of the New England Primer, identifies the first recorded edition of this work as having been published in Boston in 1727, acknowledging that earlier editions may have appeared as early as 1687, but did not survive into posterity. This serves to reinforce Paul Leicester Ford's assertion that "early editions of the New England Primer are among the rarest of school-books." Such is the case with the present example - listed in Heartman as the thirty-second discreet impression of this popular text: both Heartman and Evans cite a copy at the Woburn Massachusetts Public Library, with Evans adding the observation that its presence there "could not be confirmed" (11755). A recent search of OCLC yields no holdings for this edition. Bound in full contemporary sheep over wooden boards, lacking an inch-long section of the upper spine and the lower front corner; upper hinge cracked but holding. Text shows uniform toning throughout, some worming to margins, and across text portions of last two leaves, with resulting loss; evidence of older paper repairs. Overall, an unsophisticated, largely complete copy of a vanishingly rare Pre-Revolutionary illustrated children's book. (Evans, 11755; Heartman 32; c.f. Benjamin Frankin V, (ed.), Boston Printers, Publishers and Booksellers: 1600-1800, pp. 56-57).