BIBLIO-GIFTABLES

Spenser Susan Hawk Trouble

•  First trade edition, first printing.

•  Fine copy in fine dust jacket, the flaps unclipped and retaining original price and month/year printing code.

Design Manual, Used by aFemale Philadelphia Art Student?

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•  Later edition of a best-selling guide to drawing and draftsmanship, published by Rembrandt Peale (1778–1860), the noted American Neoclassical painter. The volume is illustrated with41 plates depicting various aspects of line production and calligraphy.

Provenance:  This copy bears an early inked inscription reading “School of Design S.E. Cr. of 8th and Locust” — that address having been one of the earliest locations of the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, now the Moore College of Art.

•  Contemporary quarter black sheep with black ribbed cloth–covered sides, spine with gilt-stamped title; spine much rubbed, corners and edges far less so. Front pastedown with inscription as above. Pages and plates clean.  (27050)

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Covers withEmbossed Paper Onlays

•  Eighth in the popular “Garland” series of American gift books. Although Faxon claims that the plates have been omitted from this retitled version of 1854's “Amaranth,” this copy has four plates in addition to the frontispiece. Click the interior image for an enlargement.

Binding:  Publisher's red cloth, covers embossed and gilt-stamped, each cover with chromolithographed paper illustration affixed; spine gilt extra. All edges gilt.

•  Faxon 259.   Binding slightly dimmed overall, scuffed at edges and joints. Front free endpaper with owner's inscription dated 1869. A few spots of foxing, mostly in proximity to plates.  (12931)

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The OnlyGIFT of Its Kind

•  First and only volume of what was intended as the start of an annual gift book series, although this sole example was reissued in the next year under the title The Lady's Gift, a Souvenir for All Seasons. The work includes one fictional piece on Shakespeare's childhood, one poem in his honor, and one essay on his birthplace, along with Mary Russell Mitford's “Talking Lady” and “The China Jug,” Lydia Howard Sigourney's “Prayers at Sea,” and Ismael Fitzadam's “Farewell”; it is illustrated with a total of ten steel-engraved plates by various hands. Click the images for enlargements.

Signed binding:  Black sheep in imitation of morocco, covers framed in heavy gilt borders surrounding gilt-stamped arabesque designs, spine gilt extra; front free endpaper with bookbinder Bradley's small pressure-stamp. All edges gilt.

•  Faxon 224. Not in Hamilton, Early American Book Illustrators. On binder's stamp, see: Spawn & Kinsella, American Signed Bindings, 55f.   Binding as above, minor wear to corners, spine with tiny scuff towards foot; binding clean and bright. Pages with varied degrees of foxing/staining and age-toning. Very spiffy.  (26673)

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ManufacturingVery Various Articles for Market

Trade “secrets” and private recipes.

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•  Sole edition: Practical guide to producing various commercial, cosmetic, and quasi-medical goods, intended for those inclined to set up shop for themselves; the “recipes” for amandine, blacking, face powder, corn salve, fly paper, egg preservatives, an ink eraser, and a simple microscope are exact and interesting.

Publishers' advertisements at back offer other useful volumes, and tout this one as, “not by any means a clap-trap book, though it exposes many clap-traps.”

•  Publisher's black pebbled cloth, covers blind-stamped, spine with blind-stamped title; limited fading and rubbing, sewing starting to loosen. Front pastedown with inked inscription, front free endpaper with intriguing “Fraters Florere” rubber-stamp. Pages faintly age-toned, otherwise clean.  (26631)

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Printed in Black & Red — Woodcut Initials — PLANTIN LEAVES

•  Each leaf now available has a single woodcut historiated initial measuring about 30 x 30 mm or 1 1/4" by 1 1/4", not colored or illuminated but bordered and highlighted in red.
Each: $30.00

Available AT THIS WRITING, subject to prior sale: C (the Israelites gathering manna), D (man kneeling in prayer, before a radiance), I (Sts. Peter and Paul), M (woman giving alms), S (the Savior[?] with an orb), and V (the Ascension).

•  Each leaf is offered unmatted, in a museum-recommended and -approved clear Mylar sleeve that will allow it to be enjoyed without worry of soiling it with hand oils or dust.

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Westward!

Post, Charles Cyrel.

•  Novel about the 1880 gunfight at Mussel Slough, in California, between settlers and the agents of the Southern Pacific Railroad. With engraved plates. Testimonials (in the back) compare it to "Uncle Tom's Cabin."

•  Publisher's brown cloth, stamped in black and silver; front and spine with decorated with a frontier scene showing Conestoga wagons in a wilderness landscape with rising sun in the background. (We can't seem to get a photograph of this that doesn't "glare out.")  Bright with a few flecks of white (paint?). Spine slightly rubbed on joints and at head and base. Pages toned. Good+. (20739)

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“In Vienna Everyone Worships the Opera”

•  First U.S. edition: Extensive andextensively illustrated  history of “the very center of Viennese culture.” Click the image for an enlargement.

•  Publisher's cloth, virtually pristine, in excellent dust wrapper with minimal rubbing to spine extremities.  (26317)

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Tips fromthe Prince of Ventriloquists

•  Second edition, revised, with a color frontispiece portrait of the author: Guidelines to throwing one's voice, imitating accents and tones, and using a dummy. The work is illustrated with numerous interesting anatomical diagrams, images of dummies and their inner workings, and room layouts for optimal performance effect.So many and various are these illustrations that we SIMPLY couldn't decide which to photograph! Click the images present, for enlargements.

Provenance:  Front free endpaper with inked ownership inscription dated 1943 and with rubber-stamp of Kanter's Magic Shop, a famed but now-defunct emporium in Philadelphia.

•  Publisher's gray-brown cloth without dust-jacket, front cover with black-stamped title and dummy vignette; spine very slightly darkened, edges and extremities with minor shelfwear. Front free endpaper as above. Pages age-toned. A nice copy.  (26622)

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Illustrations by Dulac

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•  This eccentric Russian fairy-tale is retold here in prose by Edmund Dulac, the noted children's book illustrator, from the poem by Alexander Pushkin. Dulac, in the foreword, asserts that the meaning of the tale is not easily understood, seeing it as belonging to a “class of folk tales that start as clear and simple myths and . . . have other myths or incidents, often irrelevant, added to them from generation to generation in order to make them more entertaining.” However, it has usually been interpreted as a kind of political satire.

Edmund Dulac created the book's enchanting illustrations, consisting of 10 full-page and six in-text watercolors, a two-color decorative title-page, and decorative head- and tailpieces, and initials, also in two colors. Ernest Ingham designed the book using a monotype Poliphilus font.

The binding is full Russian-red cloth with apolished brass design of a cockerel set in the front cover and a gilt-lettered title on the spine. This edition is limited to 1500 copies and this offering includes the monthly mailing notice.

•  Limited Editions Club, Bibliography of the Fine Books Published by The Limited Editions Club, 1929–1985, 205.   Binding as above. In a glassine wrapper with shallow edge tears and chips, contained within a chemise covered with Russian-red paper with gilt cockerel design with gilt-lettered spine; spine sunned and paper chipped. The whole in an unevenly sunned slipcase, with slight loss of paper to top edge at mouth and spine. A fine book, in a good+ slipcase.  (22314)

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Good Solid Early American Home Cooking

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•  Uncommon first edition. In addition to the classic and expected stewed oysters, mutton chops, and Indian pudding recipes, this cookbook includes advice on what to feed the sick, how to garnish dishes with potato crust or basic sauces, and how to roast and prepare coffee. The publisher's preliminary advertising leaves are present in this copy.

•  Bitting 384; Cagle & Stafford 621; Lowenstein 460.   Publisher's brown fine-grained cloth, covers framed in blind, spine with gilt-stamped title; worn, covers with areas of discoloration. Front pastedown with recent pencilled annotations; front free endpaper lacking; back fly-leaf with early pencilled home remedy for poison ivy. Light to moderate foxing. A well-used copy but not a “sad case”; a pleasure of a cookbook.  (26760)

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