Forty-five printed and manuscript offerings relating to the Civil War, women, the west, photography and more. Click below to view the catalog on the website or as a PDF. The PDF is fully illustrated and interactive, with all images linking to the items on our website, where more images will frequently be found. Please direct inquiries to info@jamesarsenault.com.
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A rare trade card of a prominent Boston carpet and home furnishing business with an original mounted photograph of the late President Lincoln. Childs, Crosby & Lane, suppliers of carpets, shades, and upholstery, were established in Boston in about 1862, operating out of 80 Union St. before moving to 116.....
A rare edition of this illustrated guide to locks and safes, canvassing standard methods of lockpicking and promoting the “infallible” designs of celebrated locksmith and inventor Linus Yale, Jr., whose pioneering pin-tumbler design remains the global standard. The first of two chapters describes Linus Yale Jr.’s lock, bank door, and.....
A scarce and vivid chromolithograph depicting the Fort Pillow Massacre, and a highly unusual memorialization of Civil War racial violence. This lithograph dramatizes the Fort Pillow Massacre in Tennessee on April 12th, 1864, showing Union soldiers—all but two of them African American—being murdered in hand to hand combat or falling.....
A rare illustrated publisher’s circular advertising an important early Lincoln memorial volume, containing selected speeches and writings alongside personal recollections by 200 “eminent” contemporaries. Publishers G. W. Carleton & Co. of New York here announce The Lincoln Memorial Album-Imortelles, the first memorial volume of its kind, edited by “the first.....
A scarce and attractively illustrated catalog of photographic equipment, introducing the “Wee Wizard” camera with its 3.5-inch plates, as well as several other models produced only briefly around 1898. The stated “Sixth Issue” of the Manhattan Optical Co.’s catalogs, this amply-illustrated volume opens with an introduction to its smallest offering.....
A charming trade card of a prominent Providence printing, publishing, and bookbinding firm, evidently printed early in the partnership and advertising the additional service of gilding a range of leather items in silver and gold. Printer and publisher “Honest John” Miller and bookseller John Hutchens had worked in partnership since.....
An important pamphlet in the history of women’s suffrage in America, documenting the efforts of Mormon women to retain their rights to vote, live, and worship as they choose in the face of the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887. Women had gained the right to vote while Utah was still a......
A rare broadside advertising the rescheduled date of fundraising festivities—including cash prizes—for the endowment of a home, at Madison’s former estate, “for old, infirm, and destitute ladies of Virginia,” with prize tickets drawn by two blind children. A engraved illustration of Madison’s handsome home, with its four columns and numerous.....
A scarce illustrated circular advertising two lectures in Brooklyn by an Icelandic little person and racial impostor who successfully capitalized on American fascination with the far North by giving spurious lectures as a “native esquimaux lady.” Illustrated with portraits of “Olof Krarer” (i.e., Olof Solvadottir) in western garb as well.....
An attractive illustrated broadside advertising the reduction of fares—evidently prompted by popular outcry or “opposition”—on a new “Great Through Route” via steamer and rail between Buffalo and New Orleans. The steamers Mississippi and St. Lawrence, were completed in 1854 for the Great Through Route, and their combined service offered almost.....
An appealing example of this large, integrally-illustrated baseball scrapbook with scenes of play in three New York City baseball fields. Although it was developed from the British game of Rounders in the 1840s, baseball quickly captured the American imagination, with sports journalist Charles Peverelly writing in 1866 that “the game.....
A set of six delightful chromolithographic cards in the shape of artist’s palettes, advertising General Tom Thumb’s Museum and depicting the General and his wife as well as their co-performers, little person Major Edward Newell, Zoe Meleke the “Circassian lady” with her canaries, and others. This set of advertising cards.....
A revised transcript of the murder trial of Lake Champlain smuggler Cyrus Dean in the sensational Black Snake Affair, which resulted in the first official use of capital punishment in the State of Vermont. The Black Snake Affair of 1808, as it came to be called, was a deadly clash.....
A telegraph announcing the assassination attempt on President Garfield, sent the day of the attack by a businessman in Boston’s India Wharf to his wife at home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This telegraph, sent the day that President Garfield was shot in the back by his former supporter Charles Guiteau, reads.....
A rare bilingual Yiddish-English handbill urging solidarity among New York City cloakmakers, published during the first great year of strikes by the recently-founded United Hebrew Trades association. This handbill, beginning in Yiddish (“Varnung! Varnung! Brider! Klak Makher-Arbeyter…”) with English below, urges cloakmakers to support their fellow laborers on strike against.....
A rare and marvelously illustrated circular published for the New York exhibition of the first giraffes to set hoof in the United States, describing the animals’ physiques and life in the African savanna as well as the process of capturing, taming, and transporting them. Two giraffes—the only survivors in a......
![Item #8926 [Manuscript notice regarding the ownership of three escaped and captured slaves.]....](https://jamesarsenault.cdn.bibliopolis.com/pictures/8926_1.jpg?width=320&height=427&fit=bounds&auto=webp&v=1722442036)
An unusual notice penned by a Virginia slave owner announcing his claim over three slaves—named and likely a family—evidently held by a slave catcher/thief who was refusing to release them. The notice reads in full: This is to Certify that I have in my Possession three negroes viz Anderson Lucinda.....
An early issue of this long-running monthly paper published by the “Indian Medical Institute,” an organization founded in Boston by a man who, having allegedly traveled among Native people, “reduced” their collective wisdom to a “science.” This issue of Indian’s Arcana includes a lengthy front-page article on “Logan,” famous during.....
![Item #10189 Daguerrean Gallery! Prof. Wm. P. Bassett, Daguerrian Artist, would respectfull[y]...](https://jamesarsenault.cdn.bibliopolis.com/pictures/10189_1.jpg?width=320&height=427&fit=bounds&auto=webp&v=1784729402)
An appealing and apparently unrecorded broadside advertising the services of a traveling daguerreotypist in northwestern Pennsylvania for “a few days” around April 17th, 1850. “Prof. Wm. P. Bassett” announces his arrival “to the Ladies and Gentlemen of this place and vicinity”—that is, the town of Columbus, most likely not in.....
A pamphlet outlining the necessity and promise of women’s medical education, describing the barriers faced by female medical students, and appealing for support of a proposed teaching hospital for women doctors and nurses. This pamphlet makes the case for the expansion of Elizabeth Blackwell’s “New York Infirmary and Dispensary for.....
A striking cabinet card photo of Eskimo impersonator Miss Olof Krarer in a polar bear fur outfit, complete with conical hat, posing with a stuffed white fox against a faux ice background. Olof Krarer (1858-1935), an achondroplastic dwarf, was born in northern Iceland, emigrated to Manitoba, Canada with her father.....
First edition, second impression. Inscribed by Byrd to Anna Maria Hoit, the mother of cartographer and inventor of the sun compass Albert Bumstead: “To Mrs. Horace Bumstead, mother of my friend Albert Bumstead, without whose genius it would not have been possible for us to conquer by air the north.....
First edition, one of five hundred copies. An important California book illustrated with a fine, evocative series of original photographs documenting the felling, transportation and milling of the mighty redwood, published as a promotional work for the redwood lumbering industry. Although unsigned, the photographs were taken by the publisher Edgar.....
A scarce and richly-illustrated little volume designed to amuse, instruct, and advertise in the burgeoning art of the manicure, published by the female entrepreneur whose New York City salon launched the American nail care industry. Beginning with an introductory definition of the word “manicure” (“a compound word derived from two.....
A remarkable and apparently unrecorded broadside published by William Foster Dodge, a native of Newburgh, New York, upon his return to his hometown, publicly apologizing for his disloyalty to the Union while in business in Charleston, South Carolina. Evidently having encountered significant hostility as he attempted to re-establish himself in.....