?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 25,000 - $ 35,000
(CIVIL WAR--CONFEDERATE.) William Heartsill. Fourteen Hundred and 91 Days, in the Confederate Army. 61 albumen photographs laid down on 19 leaves as issued. [8], 264, [1] pages. 8vo, original black cloth with stamped spine title "Camp Life of the W.P. Lane Rangers," moderate wear, scuffed and possibly retouched; minor wear and foxing to contents. [Marshall, TX, 1876]
"The rarest and most coveted book on the American Civil War."
First edition. Heartsill kept a manuscript journal during four-plus years in the Confederate Army, serving in Col. Walter Lane's famed First Texas Partisan Rangers until his capture in 1862. After time in Federal prisoner camps, he was exchanged in time to serve at Chickamauga under Braxton Bragg. Chafing under Bragg, he and other Texans eventually fled to reconstitute their original cavalry regiment in Texas.
After the war, as a general store keeper in Marshall, TX, Heartsill acquired an Octavo Novelty Press in December 1874 and began typesetting his journal page by page during slow moments at the store, printing a total of 100 copies of each page and then redistributing the type. He also solicited portraits of 61 of his comrades in arms, and made 100 prints of each, laying them down on special sheets with typeset captions. Bindings varied widely. As might be expected, no two copies of Heartsill's book are exactly identical. His self-deprecating preface apologizes for his grammar and unpolished printing, and he promises that "a second edition of this journal will never be printed by the undersigned on an Octavo Novelty Press."
Howes H380 ("b"--"printed by the author, page-by-page, on a hand-press; one of the rarest journals by a Confederate combatant"); Jenkins, Basic Texas Books 89 ("the rarest and most coveted book on the American Civil War"); Lowman, Printing Arts in Texas, page 14; Nevins, page I:102 ("a product of homemade printing").
