First edition. Two folding tables on very thin paper. 8vo. Publisher’s marbled boards with original paper label, rebacked, ex-library copy with stamps, old shelving label clumsily removed from front free endpaper. 94pp. New York, Snowden & Prall, 1847.
Possibly the first grammar and vocabulary of the Mpongwe dialect of the Myene languange spoken by a small group of Bantus in Gabon. According to the 1848 report of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, John Leighton Wilson was chiefly responsible for preparing this for publication. Wilson was an American missionary who served in Africa in 1834, initially in Liberia before working with the Mpongwe in Gabon. The vocabularies run, in double-column, from pages 55 to 94 and includes “those chiefly which are in most common use.”
