Catalogue Review: Charles B. Wood, Bookseller, No. 150Charles B. Wood III is an antiquarian bookseller in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who stocks an eclectic selection — from architecture to book about books to trade and commercial ephemera. In this catalogue #150: Rare Books and Manuscripts, the browser will be consistently surprised. I was. Every page I flipped offered something new, different, “intrinsically interesting,” and illustrated with full-page colorful, glossy images too.I run the risk of filling this review with item after item that caught my eye. I’ll try to contain myself. Let’s start with one of the many pieces of trade/commercial art. A huge Victorian scrapbook containing forty-nine mounted chromolithographs created as advertisements or shop displays for various companies in the U.K. ($6,500). The compiler was surely “on the inside of the color lithography business.” Other interesting commercial items include a restored folio broadside featuring Waltham copper weather vanes, circa 1875-1885 ($2,500) and a Victorian house furnishing catalogue for the Simmons Hardware Co. of St. Louis, Missouri ($1,000). There are several sample and pattern books from various trades. The Lowell Textile School pattern book from 1895 is a unique manuscript work book kept by a student ($950). It contains notes, fabric samples, dyed cotton threads, and is lovely. An 1874 printed type specimen book for Farmer, Little & Co. is complete and rare (not in OCLC, notes the catalogue) for $2,250. A large sample book containing 257 mounted and identified samples of dyed wool, swatches of felt, and woven fabrics with penciled notes by its creator, a New Hampshire dyer, is very cool ($1,750). That’s something you just don’t see often or ever.In the ‘books about books’ or printing arts category, Wood has several rarities. A first edition of the first printer’s manual, printed in 1818 by C.S. Van Winkle is so neat ($13,5000) as is a first edition of Edward Walker’s The art of book-binding, its rise and progress; including a descriptive account of the New York Book-Bindery ($1,750). I’d love to peruse that one.Two other superlatives that need to be mentioned — the publisher’s dummy of Henry Whittemore and Edward Bierstadt’s Homes of the representative men of America, with the title partly in manuscript ($13,500); and a set of ten original blueprints for the lighting scheme of Lincoln Center ($4,000). Thank you Charles B. Wood for making this catalogue review so exciting! A treasure on every page.
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