’G. Adams in Fleet Street London’ is the signature on some of the finest scientific instruments of the eighteenth century. This book is the first comprehensive study of the instrument-making business run by the Adams family, from its foundation in 1734 to bankruptcy in 1817. It is based on detailed research in the archival sources as well as examination of extant instruments and publications by George Adams senior and his two sons, George junior and Dudley. Separate chapters are devoted to George senior’s family background, his royal connections, and his new globes; George junior’s numerous publications, and his dealings with van Marum; and to Dudley’s dabbling with ’medico-electrical therapeutics’. The book is richly illustrated with plates from the Adams’s own publications and with examples of instruments ranging from unique museum pieces - such as the ’Prince of Wales’ microscope - and globes to the more common, even mundane, items of the kind seen in salesrooms and dealers - the surveying, navigational and military instruments that formed the backbone of the business. The appendices include facsimiles of trade catalogues and an annotated short-title listing of the Adams family’s publications, which also covers American and Continental editions, as well as the posthumous ones by W. & S. Jones.
“It is hard to imagine this magnificent biography ever being superseded . . . It is a stylish, splendidly erudite work.” —Terry Eagleton, The Guardian “More than any other public figure of the eighteenth century, Tom Paine strikes our times like a trumpet blast from a distant world.” So begins John Keane’s magnificent and award-winning (the Fraunces Tavern Book Award) biography of one of democracy’s greatest champions. Among friends and enemies alike, Paine earned a reputation as a notorious pamphleteer, one of the greatest political figures of his day, and the author of three bestselling books, Common Sense, Rights of Man, and The Age of Reason. Setting his compelling narrative against a vivid social backdrop of prerevolutionary America and the French Revolution, John Keane melds together the public and the shadowy private sides of Paine’s life in a remarkable piece of scholarship. This is the definitive biography of a man whose life and work profoundly shaped the modern age. “[A] richly detailed . . . disciplined labor of scholarship and love, an exemplar of the rewards of a gargantuan effort at historical research. . . . In short, buy it; it’s definitive.” —Library Journal
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