Oct 02, 2012 - Sale 2287

Sale 2287 - Lot 324

Price Realized: $ 9,600
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 4,000
"THE MOST AMBITIOUS OF ALL AMERICAN CITY VIEWS" (MISSOURI.) Dry, Camille N.; artist. Pictorial St. Louis: The Great Metropolis of the Mississippi Valley. 110 numbered plates plus 4 preliminary plates. Oblong folio, publisher's gilt cloth, wear to corners and spine ends; moderate wear to front free endpaper and frontispiece, short closed tear to a few plates. St. Louis, MO, 1876
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A mammoth effort to commit a large city to paper--not just every building and road, but every haystack, tree, and ditch. The 110 view plates are keyed to a master map for easy access, making this the 19th century's closest equivalent to Google Earth. Both of the city's professional baseball parks are shown in detail; the home of the Red Stockings on Compton Avenue shows a game in progress (plate 69). Another highlight is the early Anheuser-Busch brewery complex (plate 30, illustrated).
"The most ambitious of all American city views. . . . This publication is a tour de force. The detail is minute. Drawing the hundreds of structures in the business district alone at this scale and with such apparent accuracy would have been an accomplishment beyond any reasonable expectation"--Reps, Views and Viewmakers of Urban America 12. Howes C655 ("b").