Search Results: Titles starting with P from 19th Century Rare Book and Photograph Shop

This splendid and unusually large panoramic photograph of Cairo combines elements of antiquity, the medieval period, and the modern world. In the distance the pyramids at Giza are visible, while a train races along the Nile River between Cairo and the pyramids. The photograph is dominated by the Citadel and by the Muhammad Ali mosque, which famously has two soaring minarets. Muhammad Ali, the energetic governor of Cairo, razed most palaces and buildings in the 14th-century Mamluk citadel for this grand undertaking, begun in 1830 and completed in 1857. Cairo panoramic views of this size and scope are very scarce. Albumen print on paper, comprising multiple joined panels, overall image size 7 x 74 inches. Mounted on linen. Old folds, some wear, but generally in very good condition and with good contrast. Archivally framed.

Mammoth plate albumen print (21 x 15 1⁄4 in.), mounted on linen. Retouched in the negative. Some wear and soiling, some fading, a few creases. A rare survival.
This magnificent mammoth plate panorama shows the National Mall and the Capitol as seen from the Smithsonian Castle.
Several elements indicate the approximate date of this photograph. The Bartholdi Fountain is present. Made for the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, it was moved to the grounds of the Botanic Gardens on the Mall in 1877. Work on the marble terraces on the west side of the Capitol grounds began in 1882, but that construction is not evident here.
The photograph shows a National Mall unlike what we know today. The great lawns shown here were filled with trees in the following decades, many of them subsequently removed for construction and for restorations of the lawns. The Baltimore and Potomac railroad tracks, where Charles Guiteau would shoot James Garfield in 1881, run partway across the Mall at 6th Street. The… Read More

Printed engraved invitation. Dated 1880 in the upper right in manuscript (in a hand closely resembling Longfellow's).
This is a rare invitation to an event held in Whitman's honor at the prestigious private Penn Club in Philadelphia. Whitman, who wore a shabby coat festooned with dozens of pins, did not disappoint the curious.
An unimpressed member of the club recalled the event: "Once while I was active in the management of the Penn Club in Philadelphia, an institution at the corner of Eighth and Locust streets, started by my friend Wharton Barker, and which has entertained many distinguished persons, we concluded to give a reception to the 'good grey poet.' The gentlemen of the city were there, all in their evening dress. Whitman came over from Camden in a rough gray suit intended for the street and considerably the worse for wear. This was permissible if due to necessity or even to his own convenience. A large-framed, muscular man, he wore a long, heavy beard and gave the indication of brawn and… Read More

Printed engraved invitation. Dated 1880 in the upper right in manuscript (in a hand closely resembling Longfellow's).
This is a rare invitation to an event held in Whitman's honor at the prestigious private Penn Club in Philadelphia. Whitman, who wore a shabby coat festooned with dozens of pins, did not disappoint the curious.
An unimpressed member of the club recalled the event: "Once while I was active in the management of the Penn Club in Philadelphia, an institution at the corner of Eighth and Locust streets, started by my friend Wharton Barker, and which has entertained many distinguished persons, we concluded to give a reception to the 'good grey poet.' The gentlemen of the city were there, all in their evening dress. Whitman came over from Camden in a rough gray suit intended for the street and considerably the worse for wear. This was permissible if due to necessity or even to his own convenience. A large-framed, muscular man, he wore a long, heavy beard and gave the indication of brawn and… Read More

Contemporary half red calf. Plates foxed as usual. Light wear. Very good.
FIRST EDITION in book form with the vignetted engraved title page dated 1850. A superb association copy from the library of novelist E. M. Forster, author of A Room with a View, A Passage to India, Howards End, and others. Forster's Aspects of the Novel (1927) discusses Dickens.
E.M. Forster's father died early in his youth and his childhood was dominated his mother, aunts and cousins. Among the most prominent was his paternal great-aunt Marianne Thornton, whose ₤8000 legacy was invaluable to Forster. Her niece Edith was the first owner of this book which was read by the young Forster cousins. The Forster family copy of David Copperfield
became a part of E. M. Forster's library where it remained until his death. Upon E.M. Forster's death his library was divided between King's College, his friends and a sale catalog by W. Heffer and Sons booksellers. The present volume was lot 88 in that catalog.
"Of all Dickens's… Read More

Two volumes. Original brown cloth, spine and baords gilt. Minor wear. An excellent set. Half morocco case.
A lovely copy of the first edition, from the celebrated libraries of Frank Hogan and Marjorie Wiggin Prescott.
Nathaniel Hawthorne and his sister Elizabeth edited this Peter Parley volume for S. G. Goodrich, who had published many of the author's early tales in his literary annual The Token.
The present copy is Clark's second printing, as usual, with volume designations added to the first page of signatures. Uncommon at auction: only three copies of this title are recorded in RBH in the past 30 years, all second printings.

Original wrappers. Minor dampstain at end, foxed. Fine.
FIRST AMERICAN EDITION. This is a major paper on the founding publications on photography by Daguerre and Talbot (as well as those of Netto and Moser) and the history of the new art photography.
Sir David Brewster was a pioneer of photography. He invented the lenticular stereoscope, the kaleidoscope, the binocular camera, and other instruments. The work, published anonymously, is "an ambitious, wide-ranging account of the development of photography" to 1843 (Smith, Disciples of Light).
A rare survival in original wrappers.

Signed by John Sherman. Ohio Republican John Sherman was one of the most powerful American politicians of the second half of the nineteenth century. He served in the House of Representatives (1855-61) and U.S. Senate (1861-77) before becoming Secretary of the Treasury in the Hayes administration (1877-81). When Garfield was elected president, Sherman returned to the Senate, where he served from 1881 to 1897. Sherman was the younger brother of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman.
Sherman is most famous for the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, the first major federal action to curb the power of the great monopolies. The act was intended to prevent monopolies from using their power to restrain trade. "The purpose of the [Sherman] Act is not to protect businesses from the working of the market; it is to protect the public from the failure of the market. The law directs itself not against conduct which is competitive, even severely so, but against conduct which unfairly tends to destroy competition itself"… Read More

120 albumen photographs (primarily 6 x 8 in. to 15 ½ x 10 ½ in.), mounted, most in excellent condition with strong tones. Contemporary black morocco. Pencil captions. Photographs by Francis Bedford, Francis Frith, Antonio Beato, Frank Mason Good, and other photographers. This splendid album contains 120 fine medium and large format photographs of Gothic and High Victorian Gothic architecture. The images range from the great cathedrals and ruined abbeys of England and Europe to nineteenth-century English parish churches and country houses in the Gothic style. Panoramic views, doorways, facades, windows, columns, architectural details, and interiors are all represented. The album is a valuable resource for the study of Gothic architecture and for the history of the famous and obscure buildings it documents. Given the collection's wide-ranging coverage of Gothic architecture and its inclusion of photographs of eleven of the architect's own drawings, this album may have been a reference collection… Read More

14 x 9 in. Albumen print, on original mount. Short closed tears and some foxing to mount, image in fine condition. A fine 19th century photograph of landmarks of Rome. This early photograph, looking south over the Tiber River toward Castel Sant'Angelo and then further on to the dome of Saint Peter's Basilica, captures a view of some of Rome's most important landmarks. This vantage point had been popular with painters from the beginning of the 19th century. Painters Alexander Brullov (1826), Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1826-28) and Rudolf Weigmann (1834) all produced images of this scene, and photographers later adopted the popular view for tourist photographs like the one seen here. The invention of photography radically expanded the viewer's access to far away places. As 19th-century American photographer Marcus Aurelius Root described,"What, heretofore, the traveler alone could witness, … even the humblest may now behold, substantially, without crossing his own threshold." Saint Peter's Basilica,… Read More

A rare portrait with a Leaves of Grass quotation in Whitman's hand. The photogenic and self-promoting poet sat for (and gave away) many photographs, but very rarely did he inscribe them with his verse. Here he writes lines from his poem "Salut au Monde!"—his "calling card to the world, as well as one of his most successful compositions."
Whitman writes beneath this portrait the very lines that Folsom and Allen call a "prophetic exclamation" of Whitman's desire for an international audience (Walt Whitman & the World, p. 1):
My spirit has passed in compassion and determination around the whole earth,
I have look'd for equals & lovers, and found them ready for me in all lands;
I think some divine rapport has equalized me with them.
"'Salut au Monde!' is Whitman's calling card to the world, as well as one of his most successful compositions. With its closeups and panoramic visions of the earth, the poem extends and internationalizes the outward progression of the first person seer in 'Song of Myself.'… Read More

This is a splendid set of the best and most extensive collection of Frith's photographs of the Holy Land and Egypt. This edition's gold-toned photographs are much preferred over the earlier editions for their "stronger quality" (Gernsheim).Frith made three photographic expeditions to Egypt, Sinai, Ethiopia, and Jerusalem between 1856 and 1860. "On the first, he sailed up the Nile to the Second Cataract, recording the main historic monuments between Cairo and Abu Simbel. On the second, he struck eastwards to Palestine, visiting Jerusalem, Damascus and other sites associated with the life of Christ. The final expedition was the most ambitious, combining a second visit to the Holy Land with a deeper southward penetration of the Nile. His photographs of the temple at Soleb, 800 miles south of Cairo, represent a genuinely pioneering achievement…. The clarity of his images proved to be of immense value to archaeologists. The photographs are also often powerfully composed, revealing an understanding of the… Read More

Signed by Carter and Begin. Menachem Begin was awarded the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize, together with Anwar Sadat, "for their work in laying a foundation for future peace" in the Middle East. The framework, reached at Camp David, was facilitated by Jimmy Carter. The Nobel award called Carter "the masterbuilder responsible for the bridge that had to be built between Egypt and Israel."
Carter would have won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1978 with Begin and Sadat but for a missed nomination deadline. See "How Carter Lost Out on the Nobel Peace Prize: A Missed Deadline" (New York Times). Carter was awarded the prize in 2002.
Provenance: Calligraphic inscription to Ernest W. Michel, the noted Holocaust survivor who covered the Nuremberg trials as a journalist and later was a prominent Jewish leader in New York.Additionally signed by the photographer, Robert A. Cumins, one of the leading photojournalists and documentary photographers of the second half of the 20th century. 9 x 14 in. Color photograph. Framed. A… Read More

A RARELY SIGNED SPACE PHOTOGRAPH, signed by the crew of Apollo 11, the first manned mission to the Moon: Neil Armstrong (commander), Buzz Aldrin (lunar module pilot), and Michael Collins (command module pilot) and by NASA Administrator Thomas Paine.
This dramatic Neil Armstrong photograph of Buzz Aldrin shows the deploying of the Passive Seismic Experiment, with the lunar module and the American flag in the background. The seismometer provided data on "moonquakes" and meteor impacts on the Moon. NASA describes the image: "Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin with the seismic experiment. Solar panels have deployed on the left and right and the antenna is pointed at earth. The laser reflector is beyond the antenna and, in the distance, the TV camera is silhouetted against the black sky."
This photograph is from the collection of Thomas Paine, who succeeded James Webb as NASA Administrator in 1968. Paine was charged with fulfilling Kennedy's vow to land men on the moon and bring them back safely before the… Read More

Three joined sheets. 21 x 66 in. Copper engraved map, three joined sheets, fine, vivid original hand coloring. Title in Latin and German on left sheet. Old creases, several small repairs on verso. Very good condition.
This famous three-sheet plan of London, Westminster, and Southwark gives names of streets, drainage, parish boundaries, buildings, parks and other places. The right sheet has inset views of St. Paul's Cathedral, St. James Square, Custom House and the Royal Exchange on right sheet.
This spectacular plan of London is eminently suited for framing and display.

FIRST EDITION of this classic in the history of quantum mechanics, "Planck's Law and Light Quantum Hypothesis" (pp. 178-181 in vol. 26).
Bose sent this paper to Einstein, who translated it into German for this initial publication with the comment "In my opinion Bose's derivation of the Planck formula signifies an important advance." In this paper he "succeeded in deriving the Planck blackbody radiation law without reference to classical electrodynamics. Einstein's generalization of Bose's method led to the first of two systems of quantum statistical mechanics, known as the Bose-Einstein statistics. Paul Dirac later coined the term 'boson' for particles that obey these statistics" (DSB).
"With their work Bose and Einstein established the field of quantum statistics one year before the appearance of quantum mechanics" (Brandt, The Harvest of a Century)
This volume also contains three papers by Werner Heisenberg.Complete vols. 25-26. Contemporary half calf. Near fine, without any… Read More

ONE OF THE BOOKS OF THE CENTURY. Spock's book helped to revolutionize child-rearing in post-war America. Within one year of its first publication the book sold 750,000 copies, and it has since sold more than 50 million copies in ten editions and more than 40 languages. "When it appeared in 1946, the advice in Dr. Spock's now classic book was a dramatic break from the prevailing 'expert' opinion. Rather than force a baby into a strict behavioral schedule, Spock, who had training in both pediatrics and psychiatry, encouraged parents to use their own judgment and common sense" (NYPL Books of the Century).
The New York Times noted that "babies do not arrive with owner's manuals … But for three generations of American parents, the next best thing was Baby and Child Care … Dr. Benjamin Spock … breathed humanity and common sense into child-rearing." Spock's critics believed that his "permissive" approach to parenting had helped to create a generation of self-centered narcissists—the baby boomers and… Read More

12mo. Original brown cloth blocked in black and gilt. All edges gilt. Tenth edition stated on title. Very fine condition. Thaxter has mounted a CDV portrait of herself in the front. Half morocco case.
Presentation copy inscribed by the author and artist Celia Thaxter: "Mary Mapes Dodge with much love. Illustrated by Celia Thaxter 1882." Dodge is best known as the author of Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates and as a founding editor of St. Nicholas Magazine. Thaxter provided a poem for the first issue of that children's magazine and helped to promote it.
A perfect gem of a book illustrated throughout with 33 fine watercolors by Thaxter.
They include delicate flowers, spiders, butterflies, feathers, plants, seaweed, landscapes and seascapes, some in the margins and others superimposed upon the text. The colors are rich and fresh, and the pictures are exquisite and detailed.
Thaxter was a beloved New England artist and poet whose work was first published in the Atlantic Monthly. Thaxter became… Read More

FIRST ENGLISH EDITION of Whitman's poems.
"William Michael Rossetti's Poems by Walt Whitman was published in 1868 by John Camden Hotten, a controversial publisher who specialized in Americana, erotica, and avant-garde poetry. Hotten wanted to publish the first British edition of Whitman's poetry, but the close scrutiny he was under due to recent anti-pornography laws made a complete Leaves of Grass seem almost impossible. Whitman, confronted with a willing but cautious publisher, was forced to compromise if he wanted his poems to have a wider distribution in England. It was here that William Michael Rossetti, Pre-Raphaelite and member of the prominent family of poets Dante Gabriel and Christina whose name recognition alone would secure Whitman several high-profile readers, was a key player in turning Leaves of Grass into Poems by Walt Whitman. The belief was that a Rossetti edition would be the best means of paving the way for later publication of a complete Leaves of Grass. … [T]he… Read More

4to (9 x 7 in.). 420 pp. (wove paper with watermark "Smith & Allnut 1825), including index of watercolors, some leaves blank. 79 original watercolor and ink studies of flowers (45 full-page), 2 uncolored ink studies. 2 manuscript poems ("Sleeper" and "The Drowning Fly") by William Tennent loosely inserted. Contemporary red morocco gilt extra, spine lettered "Poetry of Flowers. By Lady E. Tennent." Very fine condition.
This splendid album of botanical watercolors and the "poetry of flowers," the product of years of reading, writing, and painting, was created by Lady Laetitia Emerson Tennent. She collected several hundred poems and lines of verse concerning flowers and the language of flowers written by poets from Shakespeare and Spenser to Wordsworth and other Romantics, the famous and the obscure.
Lady Tennent illustrated the album with finely executed ink and watercolor studies of flowers, typically placed with thematically related verse. The result is a gorgeous, elegant, and tasteful… Read More