Boston: J. Brimmer Company, 1923. First Edition. 8vo, 248 pp, in publisher's brown cloth; no dust jacket. Corners and spine ends lightly bumped, paper slightly age-toned; very good. Although best-known as the founder of the Hampton Institute Creative Dance group, Williams (1886-1978) also served as "Special Investigator of Conditions Among Negro Soldiers in the World War." Under the auspices of the Federal Council of Churches, and with the recommendation of the Secretary of War, he spent eighteen months making observations, reviewing records, and conducting interviews with soldiers, commanders, and civilians in the United States and France. Here he offers finding on the African-American experience of training and camp life as well as in combat (devoting a chapter each to the 92nd and 93rd divisions), and also discusses the treatment of African-American soldiers by a variety of social welfare organizations in providing services to the troops. His conclusions were mixed. On the positive side, he reported that "as a result of the war there was co-operation between the races in communities where previously little or none had existed. The inter-racial committees that have been organized throughout the South are the direct outgrowth of efforts to work together in the course of the war." But he also noted that "Negro men went to war believing that a new day was dawning for them, and that loyalty to their country's cause in her hour of need would be the means of their enjoying in fuller measure the blessings for which they were fighting.... When the war closed, then it is unfortunate that the experiences of thousands of these men had embittered them instead of bringing them into the freedom for which they had longed." (Item #18956)

San Francisco: California Roadside Council, 1960. 72 pp, illustrated. 7 x 9 inches, oblong, in stapled pictorial wrappers. Ink notation on rear wrapper, else fine. A scarce publication of the California Roadside Council, a group formed in 1929 by San Franciscan Cora Felton to support the preservation of California's countryside, and particularly to fight the proliferation of billboards that came with the advent of the automobile. Subtitled "A handbook for community action toward the preservation, creation, and development of beauty in our communities," this book offers practical guidance for maintaining community individuality, character, and charm in the face of rapid development. It includes sections on using city planning services, optimizing key locations, assuring good street tree planting, getting state freeways landscaped, dealing with litter, and encouraging improvement of private property, and concludes "If we accept ugliness as an inevitable part of progress, we'll get ugliness. If we roll up our sleeves, work, organize, persuade, plan, and pay, then we do have a chance to help tomorrow's California." (Item #19138)

Cover title: Loma Linda California, For Health and Pleasure. Undated, c. 1910. 5 x 6.75 inches, stapled wrappers with embossed title. [16] pp, with many half-tone illustrations from photographs. Light foxing and soiling, slightly musty. Promotional booklet for this Adventist health resort east of Los Angeles, incorporated in 1905. After describing the grounds (with their views of mountains and citrus groves) and facilities (offering steam heat, electric lights, private baths, and pure artesian and mountain snow water), the text offers a brief overview of the Sanitarium's model of treatment and information on transportation and rates. Following the model of its "parent institution," John Harvey Kellogg's Battle Creek Sanitarium, Loma Linda offered "massage and mechanical movements, baths of all kinds, including the famous Electric Light and the Nauheim baths, packs, fomentations, salt glows, vapors, medicated baths, sprays, general local douches, and electricity--static, galvanic, and faradic." (Item #19142)

Santa Rosa, CA: H.M. McKnight, 1892. Plat map printed in red, 11 x 15.5 inches. Tiny chip to one corner and one other small loss (c. .5 x 1 cm), closed tear repaired with archival tape on back, but barely visible on front. Very good. Promotes the sale of 51 lots (each individually priced) of "beautiful property...in the midst of a choice residence portion of the city of Santa Rosa," boasting that "Nothing in California surpasses this tract." Lots range in price from $400 and $1000, and two are marked as already sold. The agent is H.M. McKnight, a Methodist minister who is described in an 1895 issue of the San Francisco Call as having been "agent of Pacific Methodist College" in Santa Rosa for several years. 4 copies located in OCLC (Stanford, Berkeley, Sonoma County, Yale). (Item #19146)

New York: 1860. Fourth quarterly edition. Folio, 380 pp, in publisher's blind-stamped cloth. Re-backed with most of original spine cloth laid down, library bookplate on front pastedown, a few pages with closed tears; all else very good. Following a brief introduction and index, each page is divided into 27 small rectangles representing bank notes, each including the name and location of the bank, denomination, and verbal descriptions of any images that appeared on the bills (e.g. "cattle; farming scene in distance" or "female reclining with scroll, globe, etc.; ship and steamer in distance"). Claiming to be "the most effectual detector of spurious, altered and counterfeit bills ever published," this was one of several competing guides that professed--in an age of rampant counterfeiting--to enable their users to look up any bank note and determine if it was genuine. As historian Stephen Mimm explains, "while detectors promised to restore some measure of confidence to the currency, they often had the opposite effect, undermining readers' faith in the money supply....Publishers, after all, had an incentive to play up news suggesting that the banking system was rife with fraud or teetering on the brink of collapse. The greater the anxiety they stirred up, the more subscribers they gained" (A Nation of Counterfeiters, p. 246). (Item #19050)

Philadelphia: M'Carty & Davis, 1830. 16mo, 167 pp, in original cloth-backed boards. Illustrated with wood engravings of animals, most of which are nicely hand colored. A good, sound copy with external wear and soiling, light foxing throughout. Widely used in Pennsylvania schoolrooms, this spelling text went through at least 14 editions between 1822 and 1853. It is divided into lessons based on word length (one to six syllables), accompanied by short reading passages on subjects "such as are calculated to inspire the youthful mind with a love of virtue and truth while, at the same time, they amuse and instruct." (Item #19051)

Honolulu: Hawaiian Gazette Company, 1890. First Edition. 8vo, pp. 16 (ads), xii, 1-40, 21-24 (ads), 41-176, 25-40 (ads), with four folding maps (Oahu; Hawaii; Maui, Molokai and Lanai; Kauai) and 18 illustrations from photographs and engravings. Complete but for the original wrappers, which were replaced c. 1920 with plain brown wrappers. Chip to head of spine, previous owner's name, repair to verso of one map; good to very good overall. Whitney (1824-1904) was the first postmaster of Hawaii as well as an early journalist, publisher, and promoter or the islands. His Hawaiian Guide Book for Travellers (1875) was the first formal guide book for Hawaii. This Tourists' Guide is a longer and more elaborate work, with more maps and illustrations. It offers demographic and other statistical information and details about climate (and related health benefits), commerce, flora and fauna, volcanoes, major buildings and institutions, steamer travel, the railroad under construction by the Oahu Railway and Land Company, accommodations, sights and attractions, and suggested tour routes. Approximately 65 different advertisers offer lodging, groceries, dry goods, wine and spirits, horses, clothing, hardware, books, rifles, and most anything else a traveler might need. (Item #19139)

Leslie Enraught Keeley (1832-1900) was an 1864 graduate of Rush Medical College who served briefly as a Union Army surgeon before opening a private medical practice in Dwight, Illinois. While in the military, Keeley had become interested in the problem of alcoholism and convinced that it was a disease rather than a vice. In partnership with a pharmacist, John Oughton, and a minister and temperance lecturer, Frederick Hargreaves, Keeley worked to develop a medicine to cure alcoholics. They began marketing their remedy (which was composed of bichloride of gold and strychinine, among other things) through the mail, but soon opened the first Keeley Institute in Dwight, followed by more than 100 branches in North America and Europe, where treatment was offered for addiction to alcohol, nicotine, and narcotics. The mainstream medical profession scoffed at Keeley's medicine with good reason, but nonetheless the "cure" showed some success, in good measure due to Keeley's emphasis on group therapy and community support to help patients remain abstinent. The Statistical Report offered here (1896, 12 pp, with 2 illustrations from photographs) provides details on the age, nationality, occupation, medical history, drinking habits, and treatment of a year's worth of patients. It also reports on the number of known relapses, including the reasons patients gave for returning to drink -- the most common of which was "visiting at immoral places." The Keeley Cure and the Clergy (c. 1898, 32 pp) offers a series of testimonials from Illinois clergy who have had the opportunity to see Keeley's methods in action -- one of whom goes so far as to conclude that Keeley "should be awarded an international world's medal for the greatest and most beneficent scientific discovery of the nineteenth century." Both pamphlets in fine condition; neither found in OCLC. (Item #19130)

New York: Newcomb Publishing, for the Kansas City Star, 1912. 6 x 9.5 inches, oblong, in illustrated wrappers. [12] pp, all half-tone views of Kansas City, Missouri. Light edgewear, binding tender; very good. An unusual format, in that all of the photographs were taken at night. Includes views of well-lit downtown streets (Grand, Main, Walnut) lined with tall buildings and bustling with activity from pedestrians streetcars, and automobiles; prominent buildings (including the Biltmore Hotel and the Kansas City Star building); the skyline; and the industrial areas of East and West Bottoms with their factories and rail lines. An attractive production that succeeds in presenting the city as prosperous commercial center. One copy located in OCLC (University of Missouri). (Item #19132)

Seattle: Lowman & Hanford Stationery & Printing Co., 1896. First Edition. 12mo, 23 pp, in original wrappers. Mild crease to front cover; very good. Lee writes in the Preface that his work that "the aborigines of this far away country have no written language, and aims to put before the traveler or trader a means of communication with them which it is hoped will be of mutual benefit to both. It includes word of most use for commerce and travel and provides a lexicon of monetary terms, as well as the native names for some of the major traders and trading posts. Tourville 2665; Wickersham 2590; Smith 5799. (Item #19042)

[1884]. Three-page pamphlet in self wrappers, reprinting a letter to the editor of the Springfield [Massachusetts] Republican dated August 7, 1884. No publication information given, but apparently printed and circulated by the Indian Rights Association. Archival tape repair to spine, some small chips; very good. Senator Dawes was Chairman of the Committee on Indian Affairs and favored breaking up tribal governments to encourage assimilation by the Indians. Here he offers a defense of Valentine McGillicuddy, a surgeon and topographer who had been serving as Indian Agent at the Pine Ridge Agency in South Dakota since 1879. McGillicuddy's vigorous efforts to "civilize" the Indians were met by resistance by Sioux Chief Red Cloud and resulted in several official investigations of his methods, with mixed conclusions. Dawes argues that McGillicuddy has merely administered the law and dismisses Red Cloud's defender, Dr. Thomas Bland, as "a very strange man, having some notions about Indians which seem kind, but on the contrary making trouble and mischief with everybody who is trying to help that people." Bland was founder of the National Indian Defense Association, and his primary "strange notion" was that the Indians should have a say in their own fate. (Item #19134)

Oklahoma City: Oklahoma Law Brief Company, [1918]. 8vo, 116 pp, in original printed wrappers. Chipped at spine ends and edges, a few stamps of the Jesuits' Library, New Orleans; all else very good. In 1917, the State of Oklahoma passed one of the most stringent Prohibition laws in the nation, which stipulated that "it shall be unlawful for any person in this state to possess any liquor received directly or indirectly from a common or other carrier." The law provided exemptions for hospitals, pharmacists, and scientific institutions, but made was illegal for railroads to transport wine intended for sacramental use. The Catholic Church challenged this "Bone-Dry" law by attempting to ship a small quantity of wine from Oklahoma City to Guthrie and suing when the Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe Railway refused to carry the shipment. The district court rejected the Church's religious freedom argument and ruled in favor of the railroad and the state. The Church appealed, and the brief offered here lays out in great detail the role of wine in the Mass and the reasons why "the refusal on the part of the public to transport and deliver said wine renders it impossible for the priests of the Roman Catholic Church to carry on and conduct their religious services," and violates their religious freedom, their right to "equal protection of their property," and interstate commerce laws. The appeal was successful, and in May 1917, the Oklahoma Supreme Court concluded that sacramental wine did not constitute 'intoxicating liquor' and so was exempt from provisions of the law. The Bone Dry Controversy illuminated a growing rift between evangelical and Catholic populations in early twentieth century Oklahoma. (Sources: Oklahoma State Historical Society; Klein, Grappling with the Demon Rum; 1988). (Item #18955)

Cover title: The Colton Letters. Declaration of Huntington that Congressmen are for Sale. No place or date, but c. 1895. 8vo, 12 pp, stapled wrappers. Mild toning to edges, small sticker on front cover, short closed tears to front wrapper near head and foot of spine; very good. Following a scathing, anonymous introduction, this pamphlet reprints excerpts from private letters from Collis P. Huntington to David Colton, Financial Director of the Central Pacific. The letters -- which became public when Colton's widow produced them in court to support her claim that the "Big Four" were trying to defraud her -- provided clear evidence that Huntington had engaged in a pattern of bribing, deceiving, and manipulating congressmen and otherwise influencing legislation to favor the interests of the Railroad and its promoters. Publication of the letters in the press and in this pamphlet (which was also sent to members of Congress, possibly by San Francisco Mayor Adolph Sutro) significantly damaged the reputation of the Railroad among the public, and helped lead to the defeat of a the Pacific Railroad Funding Bill of 1896. Cowan p. 137. (Item #19058)