July Catalogue Review

Woods, Daniel. Sixteen Months at the Gold Diggings. London: Sampson Low, NY: Harper and Brothers, (1851) English edition. Woods intended this work to be a miner’s manual based upon his own experiences during a sixteen month period in the gold fields. $350. A great deal of material has been written about these events. In the ÆD there are more than 1,500 records that include both gold and California in the descriptive text.

Catalogue Nineteen includes 43 Texas items of which this is one:

The Wandering Pilgrim, or The Way to Be Happy with a Warning to the Old and Young. NY: Cornelius Gould & Co., 1840. 8vo. 16 pp. pamphlet. Sewn, text browned, edges chipped, otherwise a good copy. The author went to sea in the 30’s and spent some five months in Texas, and on page 12 makes a few brief observations in relation to Texas.” “Not in Sabin, nor have we seen another copy” – Eberstadt 133:901 (1954). $450. Undoubtedly very, very rare. I don’t find any other items in our database from this printer and only the Eberstadt record in the ÆD.

Almagre Books is located in Bloomington, Indiana, maintain their inventory on ABE and can be reached by phone (812) 334-0465 or email at wwroth@liva.net

Hordern House
Rare Books * Manuscripts * Paintings * Prints
2003
Recently a very serious catalogue arrived from Hordern House of New South Wales, Australia. It contains 109 choice items that, at least with respect to New World materials, is a reminder that such books are available, if infrequently in the marketplace. Such early materials are expensive and require either extensive personal study or absolute faith in the seller and possibly your agent if you start down this road. I can speak from experience because I collect the earliest materials relating to the New World myself. It is an extraordinary field, and it requires patience, luck and money.

These days a collection that is focused on such materials is going to take ten to fifteen years to reach even critical mass and it will not be healthy to ever think you’ll ever be complete. Perhaps in the 19th century multiple copies of the rarest materials came to auction with some frequency but not today. For those who are already committed to this field the small group of items in this catalogue that belong to this category – more or less ten – is ten more than you are accustomed to seeing so you’ll appreciate this presentation and understand the work that Hordern House put into obtaining them. For those who may use this catalogue as a point of departure for the trip into the collecting world of the ultra-rare such catalogues do not appear very often. Few dealers have the resources and skills to handle the job and even fewer have the elite clientele to whom to market them. Such catalogues are few and far between.

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July Catalogue Review

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July Catalogue Review

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