Feb 04, 2016 - Sale 2404

Sale 2404 - Lot 187

Price Realized: $ 3,250
?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 (most of them on verso of numbered pages). 215 pages. Oblong folio, publisher's gilt cloth, worn, rebacked in buckram; lacking front free endpaper, short closed tears to many leaves, cello tape repairs to about 25 leaves, 2 plates detached, rear free endpaper detached, generally somewhat brittle; signature of early owner Leo Suppan on title page. sold as is. 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. The 1834 Basilica of St. Louis can be seen in the upper left of plate 1 (illustrated); most of the land in the foreground is now the Gateway Arch grounds, and numerous steamboats can be seen along the riverfront. 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).
"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").