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(NEW JERSEY.) Zelley, William H. Manuscript diary of a bicycling fanatic. 404 pages. Folio, 16 x 10 1/2 inches, original 1/2 calf, worn; interior generally clean, final gathering detached. Burlington, NJ, and elsewhere, 1896-1903
William Haddaway Zelley (1878-1955) was a New Jersey teen when he began this diary, making a long commute into Philadelphia to work alongside his father as a book-keeper and taking a correspondence course at night. At age 18 he wrote "This kind of life is not worth living. It is nothing more or less than slavery, slavery to money . . . There are thousands of people in this same town who are in the same financial position, but many of them are content to live like dogs. I am not content and never can be" (27 December 1896). After a year of planning and saving, he purchased his first bicycle on 15 July 1897, and much of the remainder of the diary is devoted to detailed accounts of his recreational pedaling, sometimes as far as 99 miles in a day (2 August 1900). The family went into farming in 1898; on 29 May 1902, Zelley describes chasing off a group of young strawberry thieves, firing ten shots from his revolvers as he ran. This is as large a diary as you are likely to come across, filled with daily entries for six years, many of them quite extensive. Includes long descriptions of Atlantic City (July 1896) and New York City (August 1898).
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