Photographic Views of Lynn, Mass., with Historical Sketches from 1629 to 1879 ; also, A List of Enterprising Business Houses
C. E. Cook. Lynn [ Massachusetts ]: Josiah W. Heal [ 1879 ]. First Edition. [100] pages. Not paginated. Oblong 12 x 9 inches. New leather spine and corners over original cloth boards gilt. Fifty thin pasteboard leaves affixed to binding structure with linen hinges. The entire book is dampstained to varying degree. Twenty-four leaves with a single 6 3/4 x 4 1/2 inch albumen photograph (by photographer C. E. Cook) affixed to the pasteboard mount. The verso of each mount is full of advertisements. Two leaves offer four pages of information about Lynn and it's statistics/goverance. The other leaves are advertisements on verso and recto. The front pastedown endpaper has an extra page of advertisements pasted down. Over 420 advertisements in all. Bursts of color are found unexpectedly as one leafs through. Two full page chromolithographic advertisements, seven pages with 2-color ink printing, and over fifty-six woodcuts in the text. One printer highlighted his press, managing to get two leaves into the book - these leaves have slightly different formats and a finer degree of detail.
A DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THIS BOOK and it's contents IS AVAILABLE TO PROSPECTIVE BUYERS. Good. Boards. [26726]
This work was produced in at least two versions with substantially different content.
1) A business booster book (as here) with 24 original albumen photographs and many pages of business advertisements.
2) A photograph album lacking all the separate advertisements but with 23 glazed collotype images with captions and rounded image corners, each surrounded by decorative borders but with blank versos. (An example is at the Clark in the David Hanson collection).
Never common, respected ABAA bookseller Charles Wood (one of whose specialties is photographically illustrated books) in 2003 offered an example of the booster book for 3,500US noting "These ‘booster books’ were never common; this is the first one I have seen on the market in at least a decade."
We have seen only two other copies in the last 4-5 years, both with significant condition issues due to the poor production values. Swann's auction house also sold a disbound copy in 2014 for 4,750 noting 34 albumen images. We noticed several differences in both print ads and the photographs when comparing our copy to a video of that example.
A complicated printing project, and one which we suspect was printed incrementally as orders were placed (hence the variety in copies seen). An advertisement from the publisher Heal in this copy notes he has 500 images of Lynn and surrounding Boston that are available as prints. OCLC/Worldcat notes eight examples with [71] pages, [24] pages of plates (or 95 pages total). At 100 pages (plus an extra ad page),our copy represents another variation of an interesting piece of business history. It would be interesting to build a census of copies and their variations.
A detailed description of our copy is available to prospective buyers to compare against any existing copy they might have. An excellent addition to any local history, business, or photographic collection.
Price: $1,500.00