Rare Book Monthly
Articles - February - 2004 Issue
100 Books With Photographs from<br>Hertzmann, Margolis & Moss
Lydia Pinkham’s residence and laboratory circa 1879.
By Michael Stillman
The written word and photograph are two different means of presenting an image. Paul M. Hertzmann, Inc., and Margolis & Moss have combined to offer a catalogue of books that present both. Entitled 100 Books With Original Photographs 1846-1919, we find photographic images from the dawn of photography to the time by which they had become a common part of life.
The first four items in the catalogue are copies of The Art-Union, Monthly Journal of the Fine Arts. Printed in the 1840s, only a few years after the invention of photography, these publications include faded looking images of buildings, the best possible with the primitive processes available at the time. Priced at $1,800 each.
Quality would improve rapidly. But for the lack of color, one would be hard-pressed to tell the age of the photographs in item 8, an Austrian book on arms and armor from 1859. It includes numerous photographs from the collection of armaments begun in 1547 by Archduke Ferdinand II. $25,000.
One of the places this new technology was quickly put to use was in the promotion of the tourist trade. For example, item 20 is a promotion for Ithaca, New York, from 1866. The Scenery of Ithaca and the Head Waters of the Cayuga Lake promotes this region of upstate New York as a wonderful summer resort. Indeed it is, but don’t stick around for winter unless you enjoy deep snow and brutal cold. $600. Or there’s A History of Madison, the Capital of Wisconsin… This is a 420-page tribute from 1874 to this city that regularly shows up on lists of best places to live in the U.S.A. Item 40. $850.
Item 56 is a slightly different type of civic promotion. Photographic Views of Lynn, Mass… is focused on the business as well as tourist attractions of this fair city. In 1879, Lynn was a major manufacturing center. The book points out that 150 shoe manufacturers shipped 229,683 cases of shoes that year. And, the book notes that Lynn was home to Lydia Pinkham, who founded one of the earliest very successful businesses run by a woman. She produced a patent medicine to cure most if not all of what ails women. Like many medicines of the time, her cure consisted of a placebo laced with alcohol. $8,500.
