Mahone would split from the Democrats to lead a third-party movement in Virginia, the Readjuster Party, whose major thrust was to cancel certain state debts, including many incurred prior to the Civil War when West Virginia was still part of the state, and a tax was placed on slaves. The Readjusters would sweep to victory in 1880, carrying the governorship and the state assembly, and Mahone would be elected U.S. Senator. He would become the deciding vote in a split senate. Mahone chose to align his party with the Republicans. It was a mistake, the party of Lincoln being despised in the Old South. A race riot shortly before the 1883 election sealed their fate. Although the Readjusters brought the state some popular reforms, it was impossible to even appear to be on the wrong side of the race issue and win elections in Virginia, and despite his being a Confederate General, Mahone was seen as the moderate on this incendiary issue. He died in 1895 with few friends left. $275.

Item 93 may be the earliest American work on comets. It is An Essay on Comets... by Andrew Oliver Jr. Oliver was the son of a loyalist lieutenant-governor of Massachusetts, and a nephew of the despised Governor Thomas Hutchinson. Nevertheless, the loyalist Oliver stuck around after the Revolution and became a founder of the American Academy of Sciences. In this book, he wisely rejects the notion that comets are penal worlds for evil-doers, "condemned to be frozen and burned alternately, at their aphelia and perihelia." If you didn't intuit the meaning of those last two words from the context, they refer to when the comet is farthest, and closest, to the sun. However, Oliver was probably wrong when he concluded that comets are "inhabited Worlds, provided with every necessity for the comfortable subsistence of inhabitants...like the Earth." Marshall Applewhite call home. $1,750.

David M. Lesser Fine Antiquarian Books may be found online at www.lesserbooks.com or reached by phone at 203-389-8111.