Fifty items, including a rare anti-Mormon pamphlet; a complete set of Winslow Homer's Life in Camp cards; the earliest obtainable printing of The Star Spangled Banner and much 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.
Download PDF of Recent Acquisitions & Highlights in Americana, October 2026
A wonderful illustrated broadside promoting three appearances of twenty-six-inch tall Dollie Dutton in Meriden, Connecticut, and including five stanzas of verse addressed to her by the editor of a Maine newspaper. Dollie Dutton is shown here standing gracefully on her father’s hand, a pose that, dramatically highlighting her dainty stature.....
A broadside advertising a special offer for residents of northeastern Ohio to visit Niagara Falls and Canada on the Cleveland, Tuscarawas Valley & Wheeling Railway. With 400 tickets available, this “Niagara Train” was scheduled to depart from Uhrichsville, Ohio on the evening of August 25th, making several stops in nearby.....
A rare broadsheet promoting the Whirlpool Rapids near Niagara Falls, marketed as an accessible stop by way of the “Buttery Elevator,” including anecdotes and illustrations relating to several famous attempts to traverse the deadly waters. The first Buttery Elevator, named after entrepreneur John M. Buttery, opened in 1869 on the.....
![Item #10430 Established 1852[.] The Pelletreau & Raynor Chromo Lithograph Binding &...](https://jamesarsenault.cdn.bibliopolis.com/pictures/10430_1.jpg?width=320&height=427&fit=bounds&auto=webp&v=1790681701)
A scarce chromolithographic brochure promoting the printing and binding services of New York City firm Pelletreau & Raynor. Featuring a chromolithograph of a young woman knitting by a tree about to be surprised with flowers by her admirer, this Pelletreau & Raynor brochure promotes the firm’s wide variety of services.....
A vibrant yet macabre broadside on green paper advertising undertaking and funerary services in upstate New York…and furniture too. D. W. Harrington’s “free hearse!” is prominently depicted in a wood engraving, showing the horse-drawn carriage passing through a cemetery attended to by two dapper-looking men. Caskets are advertised as available.....
Stated enlarged edition of a rare specimen publication issued by The Lakeside Press of Portland, Maine, highlighting the firm’s work across a variety of printing and binding methods. In the introductory remarks, the company describes its intent in “putting forth a new edition, to show more completely the lines of.....
An apparently unrecorded advertisement for a firsthand account of the kidnapping and search for Charley Ross, written by the boy’s father Chrisitian Ross to sustain support for the effort. On July 1st, 1874, four-year-old Charley Ross and his six-year-old brother Walter were playing in their front yard in Germantown, Pa......
A fundraising circular highlighting the work of the recently-established Neighborhood Guild, a pioneering “settlement house” on New York’s Lower East Side. Founded in 1886 by Stanton Coit, Neighborhood Guild was the first American settlement house—a community center where middle-class reformers lived alongside residents of impoverished neighborhoods. Inspired by London’s Toynbee.....
A handsome trade card advertising the weekly exhibition of wares at the store of the Pennsylvania Institution for the Blind, printed with Samuel Gridley Howe’s raised type. A physician, abolitionist, author, and nineteenth century America’s greatest champion of the disabled, Samuel Gridley Howe (1801–1876) became director of the newly formed.....
A marvelously illustrated promotional circular for a sweeping three-in-one volume of natural history written by a prolific Presbyterian minister and covering “all that is wonderful in every continent of the globe.” An engraving of the intricately illustrated cover and spine of Henry Davenport Northrop’s Earth, Sea and Sky occupies almost.....
A rare broadsheet advertising a traveling panorama featuring nearly forty large-scale painted Civil War scenes, from the attack on Fort Sumter to the capture of Jefferson Davis and the assassination of President Lincoln. Organized by P. P. Warren shortly after the end of the war, the “Boston Panorama” show traveled.....
A delightfully illustrated and apparently unrecorded broadside advertising firefighting supplies and other leather goods by the prominent mid-century Boston firm of Shelton & Cheever. A spool of fire hose, alongside a nozzle, a helmet and bucket, and a section of “elastic pipe” are shown together with other leather goods manufactured.....
An apparently unrecorded illustrated broadside promoting scroll and border designs for sale by a Philadelphia photographic supply firm. Eight example cabinet cards, fanned into a circle below the title, serves to represent the designs available from “Spurr’s Celluloid Scroll and Border Negatives,” although, as a line above it cautions, the.....
A rare broadsheet promoting a speaking engagement by Wild West storyteller “Captain Jack” Crawford, known as the “Poet Scout,” featuring numerous positive testimonials and advertising a Klondike Gold Rush investment opportunity. Held in Granville, New York, the one-man-show was to feature “two hours of rare enjoyment” with Crawford, including poetry.....
An original photograph documenting the principal actors of an underhanded treaty between the U.S. Government and the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes, by which the tribes—instead of being reimbursed for ceded land—were forced to pay for irrigation projects that had yet to deliver them water. Almost forty men are.....
An English-language travel guide published by the Mexican National Railroad, tracing the journey “from the border to the capital” along the Laredo Route. Leaning into exotic preconceptions, this booklet markets Mexico to American tourists as an unparalleled land of beauty, history, and culture—all made accessible courtesy of the Mexican National.....
A rare circular describing a recently-born pair of conjoined twin girls in Indiana who had become a popular local attraction. Adapted from a newspaper article, this informative-yet-sensational text begins by discussing the birth and anatomy of the “wonderful twins,” born to farmers Lucinda and Henry Jones outside Tipton, Indiana. Joined.....
A marvelous uncut sheet of chromolithographic trade cards advertising four varieties of cigarettes produced by W. S. Kimball of Rochester, New York, including “New Vanity Fair Cigarettes,” “Fragrant Vanity Fair Cigarettes,” “Peerless Fine Cut Fragrant Vanity Fair,” and “Three Kings Cigarettes,” each image effectively a still-life emphasizing the attractive packaging.....
A vivid letter composed two days after the Great Fire of Belfast, which destroyed over a hundred buildings across some twenty-two acres, comprising an account of the writer’s visit to the city the day after the disaster. Nelson Allen, Esq. (1806–1873) was born and lived in Montville, some eighteen miles.....
An unpublished Trail of Tears related editorial letter defending both the War Department and a government contractor, Glasgow, Harrison & Co., a firm later found to have withheld or overcharged for provisions intended for the various migrating native peoples. In 1832 Congress created a commission to oversee the removal of.....
An evocative letter documenting domestic and dream life in a small California gold-mining town by a woman who ventured from Kentucky to California with her miner husband. Born in Livingston, Kentucky, Lovina Terry Padon Barnes (1833–1916) married Thomas Bartholomew Barnes Jr. (1830–1905) in 1853, and sometime before 1859 they moved.....
A rare autograph letter by Frederick Benteen, written from Fort DuChesne, Utah Territory in the lead-up to his 1887 court-martial, defending his situation and complaining that “the whole of the Deptmt. of the Platte seemed to have jumped on me in the most vicious manner.” Frederick Benteen was born in.....
A rare and striking broadside featuring a large wood engraving by Boston’s Abel Bowen and relating the eyewitness account of a New Hampshire missionary who saw a giant serpent, evidently a python, overpower an enormous tiger in southern India. Bowen’s woodcut, with touches of red making the bared fangs and.....
An apparently unpublished “brown-water navy” diary by a volunteer officer aboard the USS Kineo, attesting to the chaotic battles, intricate maneuvers, mishaps, and other remarkable episodes experienced while executing the Union’s “Anaconda Plan” on the Mississippi River. Latham Allyn Brown (1829–1901) of Ledyard, Connecticut was appointed Acting Master of the.....
A vivid, richly detailed firsthand account of the Third Battle of Winchester (Opequon), capturing a young Union soldier’s baptism by fire, graphic impressions of combat, and thoughtful reflections on the experience and its aftermath. Cochlin begins with an apology to his sister for having “not had the time to write,”.....