Rare Book Monthly
Book Catalogue Reviews - October - 2010 Issue
The Unusual from Garrett Scott, Bookseller
Poet Richard Griffin displays how to remove a lobster's gizzard.
Talk about not letting truth get in the way of a good story, item 46 is The Horn Papers: Early Westward Movement on the Monongahela and Upper Ohio 1765-1795. William Horn's work was published by the Greene County Historical Society in 1945. In 1932, William Horn of Kansas began providing locals in southwestern Pennsylvania with an amazing collection of diaries and other early material from their neighborhood. Some of this material was published in this three-volume set. However, further investigations found inconsistencies in Horn's material and it was in time determined to be fake. Arthur Middleton and Douglass Adair, who published the expose that revealed Horn's deception, noted prophetically that the Horn Papers, that "now seem worthless to their purchasers will in time become collectors' items in the field of literary curiosities." Item 46. $500.
You probably won't see anyone holding up signs reading "Leviticus 18:18" at ballgames, but this obscure Biblical passage is the basis of three books offered in this catalogue. It basically says that one should not sleep with his wife's sister, at least while she is alive. The question is then whether it's okay to marry your dead wife's sister. One might not think this a topic momentous enough to generate a lot of writing, but one would be wrong for so thinking. Item 60 is 1880's anonymously written Marriage with a Deceased Wife's Sister. $75. Item 61 is The Doctrine of Incest Stated, with an Examination of the Question. Whether a Man May Marry His Deceased Wife's Sister... by "Domesticus" (clergyman Alexander McClelland), published in 1827. McClelland did not think it a good idea, warning that it would lead to "tales that will make your ears tingle." Item 61. $50. The other side is taken by Nehemiah Prudden in his 1811 book, To Marry a Wife's Sister Not Inconsistent with the Divine Law. Item 62. $75. You decide.
Item 16 is a sermon/tribute to the recently deceased President William Henry Harrison, delivered in the Presbyterian Church in Louisville, Kentucky, on May 14, 1841: Submission to the Will of God. The speaker was the Reverend William L. Breckenridge. The minister was the uncle of the better-known John C. Breckenridge, Vice-President of the United States under James Buchanan, and Southern Democratic presidential candidate who went on to serve the Confederacy. However, the Breckenridges, like their native state of Kentucky, were divided during the Civil War. Rev. William Breckenridge, who decades earlier had freed his slaves, remained a loyal supporter of the Union. $200.
