History Of Talbot County, Maryland, 1661-1861
Baltimore: William Wilkins, 1915. 1st Edition. 8vo. Very Good+. Item #18075
A scarce and quite nice 1st Edition of this Eastern Shore of Maryland history.
Two volumes complete. Green cloth gilt. Square Tight Bindings. Clean interiors. Frontispiece portraits in each volume, Volume I with a portrait of Samuel Harrison, the Eastern Shore's most important historian and author of these volumes.
Volume II has the portrait of Oswald Tilghman, who edited Harrison's papers and published this work. Tilghman was a former Confederate Army officer and great-grandson of Lt. Col. Tench Tilghman, aide de camp to George Washington during the American Revolution.
This is one of the finest sets of the 1st Edition we've encountered. Square tight bindings. Clean interiors. Bindings with a hint of wear along edges and spine ends lightly curled. Corners lightly bumped. Gilt on spines faded as is usual for this set.
Laid in are two 1932 letters from Wyllys Rede, a Baltimore writer, professor at Goucher College, founder of the Mount Vernon College in the city, and most notably as a six year old boy, attendee at the dedication of the National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pa after the Battle of Gettysburg.
Rede was known to have sat on the knee of President Abraham Lincoln just before delivering his Gettysburg Address, listening to the President tell him amusing stories while attempting to get through the two-hour, long-winded speech of Edward Everett.
Rede's letters are to New York City executive businessman Richard P. Tinsley. At the time Rede was Librarian at the Episcopalian Diocesan Library in Baltimore, which was in the process of printing a select edition of the papers of Henry Callister, an 18th-century influential notable from Oxford, Maryland, in Talbot County on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Rede was pitching the volume to Tinsley for $250.
One of Rede's letters is holographic, while the other is a typed letter signed. Presumably this Edition of Tilghman's History of Talbot County is from Tinsley's library.
A scarce and desirable set.
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