(NEW YORK CITY) [Samuel L Mitchill] The Picture of New York

Sale 2687 - Lot 187

Price Realized: $ 1,125

?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price

Estimate: $ 800 - $ 1,200

(NEW YORK CITY.) [Samuel L. Mitchill.] The Picture of New-York; or, The Traveller's Guide. Hand-colored folding map, 12 x 12½ inches to sight. viii, 223 pages. 12mo, contemporary ½ calf, lacking front board; minor foxing, map (possibly supplied) had moderate wear, some restoration at intersection of folds, is detached and has not been examined out of mat; early inscription on title page, library bookplate on rear pastedown. The book and map are housed in an elaborate modern ¼ calf folding case. New York, 1807

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Additional Details

This early New York guidebook was an inspiration for Washington Irving's 1809 "History of New York . . . by Diedrich Knickerbocker."

Includes the scarce "Plan of the City of New York, with the Recent and Intended Improvements, Drawn from Actual Survey by William Bridges, City Surveyor," engraved by Peter Maverick. This map was bound into some copies of the book, and also issued separately in rollers. This copy has old folds consistent with being bound into the guidebook. It is based on an 1801 street-plan proposal which was never implemented, so the layout of what are now West Village and East Village is largely fictional, with named streets at different angles than the numbered ones which were actually built. The East River shoreline is oddly linear. Howes M703 ("aa").

Provenance: signed on title page by Cornelius W. Lawrence, who was New York's mayor from 1833 to 1837; New York historian Martha Joanna Nash Lamb (1826-1893) per a typed note laid in; her niece Martha Polly Whitmarsh (1867-1944) of Northampton, MA; loaned by her to Northampton Historical Society per bookplate on rear pastedown.