Rare Book Monthly
Articles - February - 2004 Issue
One Hundred Plus One<br>Rare Books from Charles Wood
MacMurdo’s flowers initiate the style of Art Nouveau
One of Boston’s larger hospitals is Lemuel Shattuck Hospital, but it’s unlikely many of its patients know who Lemuel Shattuck was. Shattuck was an educator, state legislator, and even a bookseller in Massachusetts. In 1849, he was appointed to head a committee to create a sanitary survey and make public health recommendations. Shattuck prepared a forward-thinking report that was promptly ignored by the legislature, but his recommendations would form the basis for programs which would be introduced long after his death. Item 82. $1,250.
Item 12 is Asher Benjamin’s The country builder’s assistant from 1797. This is a first edition of what Wood describes as “the first original American architecture book, and a legendary rarity.” $27,500. If this is beyond your budget, Benjamin’s second book, The American builder’s companion… is available for a more modest $2,000.
For those interested in a more exotic form of architecture, there’s Louis-Pierre Baltard’s Architectonographe des prisons…, which is, in English, architecture of prisons. Baltard’s son, Victor, is the better known architect, but the obscure father produced this book of plans for prisons. It was undoubtedly a valuable resource for both those who wished to build and those who wished to escape from one of these prisons. Item 6, dated 1829. $2,650.
Item 38 is the touching “Geraldine’s scrapbook of dresses,” put together by Geraldine’s mother between the years 1889-1904. It’s not clear who Geraldine was, but she was born in Massachusetts in 1887, and her mother kept a scrapbook of the dresses she wore at various occasions from her first cloak when she was two until she was seventeen and graduated school. Each dress has a pattern or other image, a sample of the fabric, and a description of where the dress was worn, such as her graduation from Horace Mann Grammar School. There’s even a picture of young Geraldine at the age of four. $2,500.
