Every Book has its Story

Years later Ms. Radley remembers seeing her at the Huguenot Bank in the village. She wasn't well, was uncertain of herself, depending on others to treat her fairly. In this way she remained self-reliant into the ‘50s. At around 1958, after a more serious bout of distress, she moved to a nearby facility where she lived out her final years.

The Fred Palmateer auction of her personal property in 1959 was simply the "accounting" of the physical details of her life. Edgar Beebe, who taught at the college, took an interest in her paintings and is thought to have acquired them. Their whereabouts today are unknown. The set of books I bought were not simply chance items setting upon her shelves. They in fact reflected her life-long interest in art, painting and flowers. That this set is quite valuable today is less important than that it apparently mattered a great deal to her.

Here is Goodspeed's description of the set which today might bring $12,000 to $15,000. [see below] To this record I have added this note:

This set was purchased at the auction dispersal of Miss Esther Bensley' s possessions on August 29th, 1959. Miss Bensley, for many years, ran the art department at the New Paltz Normal School. She retired in 1946, became seriously ill in the late 1950's and moved to a managed care facility where she died on February 14, 1962. Bruce McKinney purchased this set of Bigelow's Botany for $3.25 and sold it to Goodspeed's in 1967 for $225 to buy a car. Goodspeed's featured this set in the June issue of The month at Goodspeeds. The buyer is unknown. Their asking price was $350.

Today this set brings a great deal of money. Copies are around but few are as nice and complete as the volumes I bought in 1959. In 2007 this set may be in a library or private collection. If it's yours appreciate it. It has passed through the hands of people who valued it. It will pass on to others in time. People die, books live and they all have their stories.

The Goodspeed record

Bigelow's Medical Botany

The arts-and-sciences of medicine and horticulture get along famously within one man's mind if it is good and commodious enough – as in the case of Dr. Jared Eliot, and now again in the case of Dr. Jacob Bigelow. He was graduated from Harvard in 1806, just one hundred years after Dr. Eliot left Yale. Dr. Bigelow studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania under another great botanizing physician, William P. C. Barton [who had great influence on his pupil's career], and then practiced medicine in Boston under the famous Dr. James Jackson. In 1812 Dr. Bigelow gave a series of lectures on botany at Harvard, in preparation for which he did field-work around Boston and taught himself to draw. Out of this came a hand-book which was the standard for New England botany until the appearance of Gray's Manual in 1848.

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