Sep 30, 2021 - Sale 2580

Sale 2580 - Lot 139

Price Realized: $ 1,062
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 400 - $ 600
(ILLINOIS.) John Russell. Letter contrasting the prospects for a printer in Cincinnati and rural Illinois. Autograph Letter Signed to C.K. Smith, printer of Woodstock, VT. 3 pages, 10 x 8 inches, on 2 detached leaves, with address panel on final blank bearing an inked Bluffdale postmark and the free frank of Russell as postmaster; minor dampstaining, moderate wear including two seal tears on second leaf. Bluffdale, IL, 30 July 1836
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John Russell (1793-1863) was a Baptist preacher from Vermont who spent most of his life in western Illinois. There he became familiar with the Mormon settlement at Nauvoo, and in 1853 published "The Mormoness," the first novel featuring the Mormons. This letter predates the origin of the Nauvoo settlement, but sheds interesting light on pioneer printing history.

Russell was writing to his old friend Charles Kendall Smith (1810-1900) who was interested in coming west from Vermont as a printer. Russell quoted the verdict of Cincinnati publisher Eli Taylor: "If he will come on here . . . he will have more work than he can do. I will give him a thousand dollars worth a year. A power press in a well-conducted office would be overrun with business." Russell adds that his friend need only to bring a press to Cincinnati: "There is a type foundry in that place. . . . There is an opening for you in Cincinnati such as you may never find again. . . . The book business of the West is carried on there. It is a moral and religious town, and is not like St. Louis and some other western cities swimming with gamblers and blacklegs." His friend had contemplated starting a small-town newspaper with Russell: "I have no doubt that you would succeed here, but it would be folly to suppose that any part of Illinois would in fifty years to come afford you that business that Cincinnati will now."

Russell's friend apparently preferred the more bucolic path: Byrd's Illinois Imprints shows that C.K. Smith was the printer of the weekly Backwoodsman in Grafton, IL near Bluffdale from 1837 to 1839 (entry 346), and was later the printer of several books in Monmouth, IL from 1847 onward.