At Amsterdamnable-Coffee-House On the 5th of November next, will be Exposed to publick Sale these Goods following, in several parcels ([London], n.p., [1682]), 2pp. BL: 8138.h.1.(113). ESTCR9812. Hünersdorff

A two-page Tory folio pamphlet satire in the form of a mock auction catalogue. Printed catalogues advertising goods for sale were commonly distributed in advance of the sale during the Restoration period. Coffee-houses had served as locations for auctions from the early 1660s, and by the late 1670s some had developed dedicated rooms for auction sales. Political parodies of the auction catalogue form emerged in 1679: in the Sloane Manuscripts in the British Library there is a manuscript satire attacking the Court party entitled ‘A Paper of Sale left by Mr Karr. On Thursday May 29th is to be sold at a publicke sale by an intch of Candle at ye Royall Coffy house, neer Charing Cross’ (BL Sloane MSS 647, fol. 122r–v). The satire presents 35 lots supposedly revealing uncomplimentary intelligence of bastards, mistresses and the sale of places and seats in parliament, mapping the private immorality of the court onto the public corruption of the ministry. Scribal satires remained unprinted to evade prosecution for libel, but still enjoyed considerable influence through circulation in manuscript (see Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1993)). Uncensored manuscript news-letters and satires were widely disseminated through coffee-houses. For example on 26 June 1680, Roger L’Estrange took a deposition from an informant named Thomas Adamson concerning a letter found on his person, ‘he says he found it yesterday under a table at the Amsterdam coffee-house, and put it in his pocket, but that he never read it’ (CSPD1679-1680, p. 528).