Rare Book Monthly
Articles - October - 2003 Issue
This Month’s New Catalogues:<br>Travels, Americana, and More
Almagre Books’ "Americana" catalogue
Item 46 is Edward Beecher’s Narrative of Riots at Alton: In Connection with the Death of Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy. Beecher was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s brother and an ardent abolitionist. So was Lovejoy, the subject of this book. He briefly published an anti-slavery pro-free speech newspaper in St. Louis, until it was destroyed by a mob. Undaunted, Lovejoy moved across the river to Alton, Illinois, where he had three more presses destroyed by pro-slavery mobs in the Land of Lincoln. Finally, as he and several other defenders tried to hold off a mob seeking to burn the press down, he was killed by gunfire at the age of 34. He was buried in an unmarked grave, but a large monument in the Alton Cemetery now marks this worthy man’s final resting place. $375.
For collectors of western Americana, there’s item 146, The Life and times of Christopher Carson… We know Christopher better as “Kit” today. This 1861 biography was published during his lifetime. $200. Or how about a printing of an 1897 letter from Elizabeth B. Custer, better known as Mrs. George Custer, defending her husband against charges he disobeyed orders at Little Big Horn? Item 204. $150.
Item 321 is Facts and Faces in the Kalloch Trial. Rev. Isaac Kalloch was a powerful orator with a checkered life. Born in 1831, he first served as a pastor in Maine. He later moved to Boston, where his sermons drew standing room only crowds. However, he was supposedly caught in an act of adultery with, sad to say, the wife of a bookseller. Kalloch moved on to Kansas where he founded Ottawa University, and from there to San Francisco. Again he preached to large crowds, and through a classic political flip-flop, secured the Workingmen’s Party nomination for mayor in 1879. Once sympathetic to the Chinese, Kalloch flipped to join the forces trying to push them out. Shortly before the election, he was shot by a newspaperman in an unsuccessful assassination attempt. Perhaps because of sympathy, he was elected and served one term. Two years after leaving office, Kalloch again moved, this time to Washington State, where he died in 1887. $600.
Item 380 describes how virtually all diseases can now be cured. You didn’t know? J.C. Boyd’s 1879 “The Blood is the Life!” An Astonishing Discovery…Nearly All Diseases Effectually Cured by Boyd’s Miniature Galvanic Battery! Obviously Boyd didn’t consider lying a disease, as it didn’t cure him of that. $300.
