Rare Book Monthly
The Collaborative Project:Who Says You Can't Go Home Again
New York Journal published at Esopus.
One is a piece he wrote to present to the Ulster County Historical Society in 1861 and the other is a Pestalozzian School Song Book dated 1855. In our upcoming auctions section last fall I found the September 22, 1777 edition of the New York Journal that had relocated to Kingston after the British occupied New York City. I recently found a nice copy of a Report on the Ulster Mine at Ellenville, dated 1852 with a chart tracing their efforts to mine lead and copper. I found this first in the AED and then looked on line and found a very nice copy for sale. Several years ago I found a copy of Washington’s Farewell Address to the People of the United States that was printed in Hudson, New York in 1812 and presented to a John Adams. The American Antiquarian Society of Worcester helped me try to figure out if this could be the John Adams (probably not!). I found online the publisher’s dummy of a book titled Enoch Crosby or The Spy Unmasked that was printed in Fishkill at the Fishkill Weekly Times in 1886. It is a reprint of a very rare first edition but probably is very rare (but not necessarily valuable) in its own right. I found online a lovely copy of The Geology of the Hudson River and the Adjacent Regions printed in New York in 1820 with a wonderful hand colored chart of the Hudson River running as far north as Marlborough. This was listed on ABE by a New York dealer and I found it doing place-name searches. I have two copies of the first edition of Tom Quick, the Indian Slayer published in Monticello in 1852 and a single tender copy of a reprint of it made on newsprint at Deposit, New York in 1894, all found and purchased on the net. I found on ABE a book printed in Marlborough for Eldorous Dayton titled Legal Advice, A Compendium of Law of the State of New York. I also have acquired online a variety of local imprints of no particular distinction except they are old, clearly rare, and very inexpensive to accumulate. For these kinds of things I try to draw the line at $35 but occasionally spend more. For books with interesting content I’ve spent as much as $1,200 online as I did for Barnabas Bidwell’s The Susquehannah Title printed at Catskill in 1796, $300 for The Constitutions of the Sixteen States which compose the Confederated Republic of America, published at Newburgh in 1800, and $100 for The History of Little Henry and His Bearer, published at Catskill in 1818. Recently I bought at New England Book Auctions, for about $8,000, three broadsides printed at Fishkill for General Washington who was commanding his army at their wintering location at Newburgh. NEBA doesn’t have a website yet so this material is more difficult to follow.
