Baxter, Richard. Reliquiae Baxterianae: Or, Mr. Richard Baxter's Narrative of the Most Memorable Passages of His Life and Times. London: Printed for T. Parkhurst, J. Robinson, J. Lawrence, and J. Dunton, 1696.
Richard Baxter died in 1691, leaving Matthew Sylvester, his literary executor, with thousands of manuscript pages of successive drafts of an autobiographical work. Sylvester edited an eight hundred page condensation of the work, and it was published by an alliance of nonconformist booksellers. Perhaps his own editorial anxieties about misreading and misrepresenting Baxter's life inform Sylvester's "anatomy" of "Readeres of different sorts," which ends his lengthy "Preface to the Reader." The anatomy begins slightly more than halfway down the page. The fiction of a private correspondence with an ideal (or at least sympathetic) reader is exposed in Sylvester's catalogue of ten varieties of readers, representing a gamut of interpretive stances from censorious to public spirited. Folger Call No. B1370. sig. d1r
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