Later half blue calf over marbled boards. The spine gilt ruled with the titles in gilt as well. Beautiful marbled endpapers. Illustrated with one small woodcut in the text plus a steel engraved vignette and six steel engravings h.t.
All seven steel engravings printed on India paper and mounted on heavy card stock. Most copies were printed on ordinary paper but our copy is a large paper copy sized 337 x 265 mm, resulting in extremely generous margins.
The binding slightly rubbed and some light foxing throughout on the plate(-mounts), however, heavier on one plate (please see picture nr. 5).
The text pages, printed on heavy off-white paper, are totally clean.
The first two parts of a series of very fine steel engravings, which was intended to run for a longer period, but was discontinued after only two parts had been published.
The beautiful plates bear the following captions:
The Palisades from the landing at Fort Lee (Frontispiece vignette)A beautiful, expensive publication with charming plates by or after E.W. Clay, Archibald Dick, James Smillie and others.
The Narrows
Bay and Harbor of New-York
Hell Gate
New-York from Staten Island
View from Jersey City (Woodcut)
Hoboken
Weehawken
Sabin 33520: "Of this fine work Parts I and II only were issued. The panic of 1857 caused its discontinuance." (*)
(*) Although 1857 showed the start of a financial crisis, the first worldwide crisis in history, Sabin probably means the panic of 1837 when the United States was hit by a heavy recession that lasted well into the 1840's, although of course it is quite likely that this is just an unfortunate typographical error in his "A dictionary of books relating to America".
Click on a picture to enlarge.