The City of Louisville and a Glimpse of Kentucky.

Louisville, KY: Committee on Industrial and Commercial Improvement of the Louisville Board of Trade; Courier Journal Job Printing Co., 1887. 4to (12.5” x 9.75”), chromolithographic wrappers with maroon cloth spine. Folding frontis. birds eye view (14” x 12.5”, plus margins), 154 pp., [1] p. ad for Harper’s Magazine, [1] p. index. CONDITION: Good, front cover splitting along spine two inches at top and six inches at the bottom; small loss to the bottom-left corner of page 6; contents bright and clean.

An extensively illustrated promotional book offering a comprehensive account of the city of Louisville and the companies operating there, with a large folding bird’s eye view.

The text offers a detailed and extensive history of Louisville, spanning from the eighteenth century to the time of publication. The first half of the pamphlet covers the city’s, commerce and manufactures, Coal Future, banks, real estate, railroads (extant and under construction), waterways, climate, agriculture, timber, water-courses, mineral resources, taxation, and more. The second half of the work treats dozens of prominent commercial and manufacturing interests in Louisville including the Ohio Valley Telephone Co., the German Insurance Bank, the Kentucky Mailing Co., the Louisville Fair Co., Simon Shulhafer, and the Chesapeake & Ohio Route. Illustrations show scenes of city life in Louisville, municipal buildings, bridges, the Kentucky Institute for the Blind, a public amphitheater, landmarks, residences, livestock, horses, bodies of water, homesteads, and so on. Many tables are provided recording population and other statistics relating to Louisville and Kentucky. The frontispiece “Birdseye View of the City of Louisville” shows the densely populated city adjacent to the Ohio River, with railroads criss-crossing the city and vessels populating the river. Eighteen buildings are identified below the view, a key to which is featured at lower-right.

Born in Henderson, Kentucky, Young Ewing Allison (1853–1932) was a writer and newspaper editor. Partially deaf from an early age, Allison became a voracious reader as a child and by age fifteen was working as an editor for the Henderson News. In 1873, he moved to Evansville, Indiana where he found work as a newspaper editor. In 1880 Allison was hired as city editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal. In 1887 he founded a trade journal The Insurance Field and served as its editor until 1926.