The Back Room
The Back Room presents both Americana and international materials. This inventory is a selection of rare, scarce and one of a kind materials published in the 18th, 19th and occasionally the 20th century. The Back Room also includes 19th century American wall maps, an area of special interest. The Back Room inventory will be updated frequently.
Displaying 21 - 40 of 76Pages
This 18th century map of Maryland is the first published atlas map of the State of Maryland published in America. The copper plate engraving portrays Maryland's topography, networks of natural waterways (at a level of detail from river to creek to marsh and even a beaver dam), main routes, counties, cities and towns as of 1795.
The scene drawn by Edward Savage of Liberty as the Goddess of Youth offering sustenance from her golden goblet to the American Bald Eagle as he descends from backlit clouds captures the moment in American history when the new nation is being born. Drawn in the sky above Liberty and the Bald Eagle, emerging from smoke and clouds is the new American flag with thirteen stars, a cloth liberty cap atop the flagstaff.
This hand drawn student work, signed and dated inside a wreath of floral branches "ROXBURY Free School Febr. 8th, 1800, Abraham S. Fox Scripsit." is both a tribute and a mourning piece to the recently deceased President George Washington a scant six weeks after the President's death. Abraham S. Fox dedicates this drawing to his teacher "To the Preceptor" in the lower right corner. Perhaps this work was a classroom exercise.
The Georgia Plan (1808) and the Sturges/Bohlen Archive (1795-1808) are a remarkable set of newly discovered historic documents centering on Georgia and Philadelphia that personalize Georgia's complex land accession and land survey history, and highlight major land fraud schemes of 1795 to 1808. Sturges' Georgia Plan (1808) and the Sturges/Bohlen Archive are first person reminders of America's fraught creation myth, and highlight the competing forces of private investment in land, mercan
This book is the scarce first American edition of this 18th and early 19th c. music work. The purpose of the first two London editions of this collection of psalms and hymns and of this first American Edition, was with varying success the charitable support of the Chapel of the London Lock Hospital, an English institution that opened in 1747 as the first clinic in London dedicated to the medical care of women afflicted by venereal disease. Later the hospital developed a maternity ward and gynecological services.
We read in the title page of A Volume of Sacred Musick that its author is "The Late Hon. John Hubbard. Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy in the University of Dartmouth." his academic affiliation in an unusual format that substitutes "Dartmouth University" for the actual name Dartmouth College, given in its 1769 original Charter. Professor John Hubbared (1759-1810) died before publication of his work.
This scarce, early 19th century engraving shows the naval battle at Plattsburgh, New York in 1814, the concluding and decisive American naval victory of the War of 1812 between America and Britain. The battle was momentous. Lake Champlain offered the British Navy a potential naval gateway from Canada into America. Lake Champlain would have provided the British Navy with water access via a short portage to Lake George and further south via the Champlain Canal to the Hudson River.
This Album is a six year slice of life along the Connecticut River only 50 years after the American Revolution that reflects contact with America's foremost institutions, America's early 19th c. intellectual activists, educators, abolitionists, free thinkers, and artists - including the deaf painter Augustus Fuller, Catherine E. Beecher, Thomas Gallaudet, religious thinkers and relationships in the personal life of Gratia Denny, an extraordinary individual.
This hand drawn map is signed "Phebe Varney, 1830. Dover Duchess County" on the front. The title of the map is "Africa". The map is hand drawn on thick paper with colored inks and possibly a fine brush. The thickness and opacity of the paper would not have permitted easy tracing and therefore it is most likely the author of the map drew it freehand, perhaps using a grid system (or longitude and latitude lines) to scale up or down a published map or set of maps of Africa. The map appears to be unique.
A New Map of London And Its Environs, 1829, likely published in late 1830 or in 1831 based on the range in the heading of the population chart on the map (1829-1830) is a detailed and historic image of London as a major city in transition from local industry to international trading powerhouse. A myriad of place names are labeled, streets and ways to the smallest route, the Thames and Greenwich Reach to Blackwell Reach and the Isle of Dogs. Factories stand by farmland. Fields and wetlands are delineated graphically. A windmill near the Cricket Grounds is shown.
This rare and early published survey of the Towns of Dorchester and Milton, Massachusetts was prepared and published to satisfy the 1830 order of the Massachusetts Legislature that each town in the Commonwealth have prepared a survey of its boundaries, roads and interior features. The 1831 Edmund J. Baker survey of these two towns straddling the Neponset River, which serves as the boundary line between them, conveys considerable geographic, economic and historic information about these early Massachusetts towns as of 1830 to 1831. Both 18th and early 19th c.
The John G. Hales Plan of the Town of Concord, Mass. in the County of Middlesex, 1830 is the first published survey plan of Concord. This particular edition of the 1830 John G. Hales Plan of the Town of Concord, Mass., published by Pendleton's Lithography of Boston, appeared in Lemuel Shattuck's book The History of The Town of Concord...From Its Earliest Settlement to 1832 that was published in 1835. There is an independently published version of this 1830 map that was also published by Pendleton's Lithography.
This monumental 1836 engraved survey of the extremity of Cape Cod showing the iconic curve of the Cape as it comes around and encloses Cape Cod Bay took three years and required 9 assistants to Major J.D. Graham U.S. Topographical Engineer in order to complete the work. This is the first government survey of the entire extremity of Cape Cod, that area of Cape Cod Bay and that portion of the Atlantic Ocean. In 1833, when the work was begun, Provincetown was an active maritime harbor and the civilian and military usefulness of this chart was considerable.
This rare, 1837 edition of the Map of Massachusetts, Rhode Island & Connecticut maps each of these New England states by county outlined in red, town or city in contrasting colors and locates the numerous large factories in operation in these three New England states in the early phase of America's rapid industrialization. Although New York is not shown on the map, New York city is. The map states at the top just below "New Hampshire", "this Map in addition to the information usually found on the best Maps, contains the Factories, Churches, Academies, Banks.
Edward Bailey, teacher, artist, craftsman, surveyor, naturalist, businessman, and man of many other skills drew this image of the town common of Holden, Massachusetts. It is a summer landscape and the tall trees surrounding the town common are in full leaf.
In this considerable 1840 undertaking J.W. Norie, Hydrographer published the latest version of his New General Chart of the West Indies and the Coast of America that captures the geography and political identity of what would five years later become the east coast of the American State of Texas. Florida's southern arm is shown. The commercially important islands of Cuba, Saint Domingo, Bermuda, Porto Rico and what is labeled "Central America" and the north coast of South America are also shown.
This fine, steel engraved map was engraved by J. H. Young (fl. 1817 to 1866) and published by Samuel Augustus Mitchell (1792 to 1868) who revised the map for two decades beginning in 1832. The map was published as a folding map to allow a traveler to put the map in his pocket, and take it out as needed to study while planning a trip or en route westward. The map was one of the most authoritative travel maps during this early period of America's westward expansion. The hand colored map is both decoratively colored and color coded as explained by the map's key.
Portraits of the eleven U.S. Presidents as of 1846, the insignia of the current 29 states, including Iowa admitted December 28, 1846, Florida on March 3, 1845 and Texas on December 29, 1845. This is a full color lithograph that also presents George Washington at the top and center of the composition framed with a green olive wreath and overseeing a fierce American Bald Eagle who sits astride both the draped flags of the Union on poles decorated with gold braid and tassel, and a large red, white and blue shield bearing the insignia of the 29 admitted states.