Search Results: Titles starting with H from 19th Century Rare Book and Photograph Shop

First edition of the Scarlet Letter. Henry James hailed The Scarlet Letter as "the finest piece of imaginative writing yet put forth in the country … It is beautiful, admirable, extraordinary."
[Tipped in at the front:]
A long reflective letter written by Hawthorne to popular American essayist and novelist Donald Grant Mitchell, best known by his pen name "Ik Marvel." His best-selling Reveries of a Bachelor (1850) was reportedly one of Emily Dickinson's favorite books.
Hawthorne's letter follows a wartime visit to Washington with publisher, friend, and advisor William Ticknor. While there he saw the war first-hand, meeting President Lincoln and visiting the Manassas battlefield. He also posed for portraits, including photographs at Mathew Brady's studio and a painting by Emanuel Leutze.
He tells Mitchell, in part: "I think the enclosed photograph [not present] is the least objectionable of half a dozen from which I selected—all of them being stern, hard, ungenial, and more over, somewhat grayer… Read More

Salted paper print from a calotype negative (6 ½ x 5 inches). Tipped onto later mount. Excellent condition.
This is a fine salt print portrait of Harriet Beecher Stowe by John A. Whipple, a leading early American portrait photographer.
When she sat for this portrait in 1853, Stowe was at the height of her fame. Her Uncle Tom's Cabin had become a runaway best seller in the United States and Great Britain when it was published in 1852. The book invigorated the abolition movement and moved many Northerners who were on the fence to active opposition to slavery. Stowe visited Lincoln at the White House in 1862, and the president is said to have exclaimed, "So this is the little lady who made this big war."
John A. Whipple (1822-1891) was one of the pioneers of American photography. He came to Boston as a young man in 1840, he was one of the first in the United States to learn Daguerre's process. That year he became the first American to produce the chemicals for Daguerre's process. "He was instrumental in… Read More

The Haymarket Affair in Chicago was the most important event in American labor history. This dramatic Chicago newspaper reports on the events at the Haymarket, police actions, rioting, efforts to catch the bomb thrower, the roundup of anarchists, the discovery of the printed flyers for the mass meeting, and the reaction of Chicago businessmen.
When Chicago police killed two men demonstrating in favor of the eight-hour work day on May 3, 1886, activists called for a mass protest meeting in the Haymarket Square for the evening of May 4. Around 10:30 the police arrived to order the crowd to disperse. A homemade bomb was thrown in their path, killing one and injuring many more. Gunfire erupted resulting in seven policemen and at least four workers being killed, with many more wounded. Rioting ensued. That summer eight anarchists were tried and unjustly convicted for conspiracy in connection with the bombing.
"No single event has influenced the history of labor in Illinois, the United States, and even the… Read More

A classic, characteristic daguerreotype portrait of Henry Clay, the "Great Compromiser," a dominant force in American politics for decades. He represented Kentucky in Congress from 1806 until his death in 1852, with a few breaks for cabinet duty or a presidential campaign–he ran four times without success. A political moderate, he brokered the Compromise of 1850 that kept the United States intact.

A nearly identical portrait of Clay was copyrighted by Philadelphia photographer Montgomery P. Simons. Simons wrote to the Photographic Art Journal in 1853 to discuss this sitting:

"My likeness of Mr. Clay, which has elicited so many encomiums from the press, and which you have been pleased to criticise so favorably, as a valuable likeness, is still more valuable for having associated with it a pleasing and characteristic anecdote of that great statesman. This anecdote made such a strong impression upon my memory, as being a most elegant impromptu, that I am now able to give it to you verbatim, although… Read More

Provenance: Emma Frances Johnston (1834-1905), with her inscriptions dated 1858, 1864 and 1904; her niece, Anne R. Hanson, with her inscription dated March 1915.
This tremendous discovery is the extensive photographic archive of the little-known Victorian photographer Emma Frances Johnston. This is apparently the earliest comprehensive archive of a female photographer in private hands. Beginning around 1858, Johnston made this wonderful series of portraits of her friends and extended family comprising the intellectual and social world of nineteenth- century Hampstead in London.
The introduction of the wet collodion process in the 1850s brought a minor wave of amateur photographers, very few of them women. At around the time that Emma Johnston was making her portraits in Hampstead, Lady Clementine Hawarden began to make her photographs. Julia Margaret Cameron took up photography when she received a camera as a gift in 1863.
This unique collection is essentially the only known source for the study of… Read More

FIRST EDITION. A magnificent set of Clarendon's History of the Rebellion, "the most valuable of all the contemporary accounts of the Civil Wars. … His characters are not simply bundles of characteristics, but consistent and full of life, sketched sometimes with affection, sometimes with light humor" (DNB).
"Since its publication at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Earl of Clarendon's history of the English Civil War has remained one of the most important sources for our understanding of the events which changed the course of British history… [It] chronicles in absorbing detail the intrigues and upheavals, the alliances and confrontations, the triumphs and the tragedies, of the 1640s and 1650s. In elegant and vital prose it brings to life the personalities who shaped the era, and the principles for which a nation was divided" (Oxford University Press).
This work has "remained in the mind because of his literary achievement the fashioning of the most sophisticated and finely… Read More

4to. Six volumes. Contemporary calf, red morocco labels, spines heavily gilt- tooled, spine ends neatly restored. First volume recased, spine ends and joints restored. Two small worm trails at front of vol.I in upper margin not touching text. A handsome set.
First editions of all six volumes of the most celebrated historical work in English literature. Gibbon's Decline and Fall covers the thirteen centuries from the age of Trajan to the fall of Constantinople with unmatched erudition, clarity, and organization. "Gibbon brought a width of vision and a critical mastery of the available sources which have not been equaled to this day; and the result was clothed in an inimitable prose" (PMM).
Gibbon wrote that it was in Rome on October 15, 1764 while "musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, where the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter … the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started into my mind." It was not until 1772, after his father's death and… Read More

The Great "She" Bible, the "authorized version" or King James Bible, one of the greatest monuments of English literature. This edition is known as the "She" Bible for the reading "She went into the citie" in Ruth 3:15. In this copy he error "Judas" for "Jesus" in Matthew 26:36 is corrected with a pasted-on slip. Fry styles this the "first edition, second issue," though it is more properly the second edition. "The general title is usually dated 1613, though the NT title bears the date 1611. Probably the greater part of the book was printed in 1611, but the publication, for some reason or other, was delayed till 1613. . . . Smith suggests [the delay resulted from] an accident in the printing-office which destroyed a large number of sheets" (Herbert).
One of the masterpieces of the English language, the King James Bible is surely the greatest literary work ever created by committee. In the preface, Miles Smith, one of the dozens of translators, commented on the importance of the work: "Translation it is… Read More

The earliest dated photograph of Mount Vernon, this is one of the very earliest known photographs of George Washington's home.
By this time Mount Vernon was badly dilapidated. This view from the northeast shows ship masts propping up the portico's sagging roof where several columns had rotted away. A man wearing a dark suit and top hat stands in the foreground, his arm on a white painted fence protecting a small tree.
The Mount Vernon Ladies' Association, formed in 1853, purchased the mansion and estate from Washington's descendant John Augustine Washington III for $200,000. After an intensive fund raising effort and protracted negotiations, the organization took possession on February 22, 1860, nearly one year after this photograph was made. Extensive renovations were soon made. As a result this image shows a number of architectural and landscape elements differing from those seen in photographs of the 1860s.
Rare. The other known examples are at the Fred W. Smith National Library at Mount… Read More

Salted paper print (5 ¼ x 7 ½ in., on publisher's 8 ¼ x 10 ¼ inch mount with gold lithograph captions and decorative border. Neat punch holes in upper margin, ½ inch adhesion at lower right, faint pencil note in lower corner. Very good.
The earliest dated photograph of Mount Vernon, this is one of the very earliest known photographs of George Washington's home.
By this time Mount Vernon was badly dilapidated. This view from the northeast shows ship masts propping up the portico's sagging roof where several columns had rotted away. A man wearing a dark suit and top hat stands in the foreground, his arm on a white painted fence protecting a small tree.
The Mount Vernon Ladies' Association, formed in 1853, purchased the mansion and estate from Washington's descendant John Augustine Washington III for $200,000. After an intensive fund raising effort and protracted negotiations, the organization took possession on February 22, 1860, nearly one year after this photograph was made. Extensive… Read More

7 engraved plates, some folding. Contemporary calf, morocco labels. Very good.
The edition that Thomas Jefferson owned. Jefferson wrote from Monticello in 1817, "While I was an amateur in Agricultural science (for practical knowledge my course of life never permitted me) I was very partial to the drilled husbandry of Tull."
Jethro Tull's invention of the seed-drill helped bring about a revolution in agriculture. "By contour ploughing, drilling his seed at wide intervals, and using his horse-hoe to destroy weeds, Tull was able to grow wheat on the same fields for thirteen years continuously without manuring" (ODNB). "The practices of drill-sowing and frequent hoeing are the greatest improvements which have been introduced into the modern practice of tillage" (McDonald).
Sowerby, The Library of Thomas Jefferson 701. Printing and the Mind of Man 188 (first edition of 1731).

First English edition, first printing. A piracy, printed from the Bohn edition plates. Clark, A 17.2a. Octavo (176 x 105mm). Original blue-green cloth, gilt-stamped spine (lightly faded, a few spots).
and
First English edition. Two volumes, octavo (198 x 120mm). Original brown cloth, blind stamped (worn, head and tail caps frayed, slightly leaning, text block somewhat loose in Vol. I). Provenance: Charlotte Sparrow 1786-1876, educational philanthropist residing in the notable Bishton Hall (bookplate and pencil inscription).
Two first English editions. This English edition of The Blithdale Romance is the true first overall, as Ticknor and Fields of Boston paused to allow Chapman and Hall to publish first and therefore protect the English copyright of the novel. The House of the Seven Gables received major critical acclaim in England, with the Athenaeum ranking Hawthorne as one of the most original novelists of modern times following its release (Wineapple, 239). See Brenda Wineapple's Hawthorne: a Life (2004).

Broadside. 3 3/4 x 8 1/4 in. Near fine.
First and only edition. This document provides guidance for forming local Mark Twain clubs from the Mark Twain Society, founded by Cyril Clemens in 1930.
Scarce: WorldCat locates only the copy at University of Virginia.

Two volumes. 19th-century half brown morocco and marbled boards, nicely rebacked in matching morocco. Light wear and foxing. Very good. FIRST EDITION. Presentation copy inscribed by Longfellow: "Henry R. Cleveland with the affectionate regards of the author" and with Cleveland's signature and bookplate. Soon after he joined the Harvard faculty in 1836, Longfellow, Henry Cleveland, C. C. Felton, Charles Sumner, George Hillard formed an informal intellectual society they later called the "Five of Clubs." No other presentation copy of Hyperion appears in the auction records of the past thirty years. Although Longfellow was later generous with presentation copies for his increasingly wide circle of friends and admirers, in his early years he reserved presentation copies for his family and closest friends. As a result they are rare in the market.