Rays of Sunlight from South America

Gardner, Alexander [and Henry De Witt Moulton]. Rays of Sunlight from South America. Washington, D.C.: Philp and Solomons, 1865. Oblong folio with 68 of the 70 original plates. Each with albumen print mounted recto, image approx. 17.2 x 22.5 cm, with letterpress caption and credits (Gardener for the “positive”; Moulton for the “negative”) on mount. Some mounts with minor soiling or damp stain to edges, not affecting images. Lacking front album cover, title page, preface and 2 plates (nos. [1] and [2]).

Monumental photographic album printed by famed Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner from negatives by an itinerant American photographer, Henry De Witt Moulton. Moulton’s photos of Lima and the Chincha Islands were taken while he was living in Peru, sometime between 1860 and mid-1863, when he returned to the US. The size of the edition is unknown, though it was printed around the same time as Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War (and advertised with it in early 1866), copies are exceedingly rare.

The album’s significance has been chronically underestimated. It provides fascinating transnational and bibliographic context for the better known Photographic Sketch Book, and comprises the most comprehensive photographic evidence of the historic guano deposits and the laborers who worked them. Gardener’s selection of 38 (36 in the present copy) views of Lima and Callao for the opening section of Rays of Sunlight largely follow other contemporary images of the capital’s major monuments. The extraordinary nature of the album lies instead in Gardner’s addition of 32 of Moulton’s unique “views of those celebrated Islands situated within the rainless region of the Peruvian Coast, and which furnish the richest fertilizing material known to agriculture.”*

In the early 1860s the Chincha Islands’ guano heaps were the world’s most important source of fertilizer. Revenues from the nationalized deposits paid for much of Peru’s public works from 1840-1870, including construction of the railways that crossed the Andes. Even more importantly, guano income was used by the state to free its black slaves and to abolish poll taxes on indigenous citizens.

Despite these progressive measures, the Chincha Islands’ guano piles were worked by prisoners and indentured Chinese laborers who were brought to Peru in large numbers under a policy known as Ley China to replace freed slaves in all aspects of industry and agriculture. Nearly half died from ill-treatment and overwork in one of the lesser-known and grim episodes of British Imperial human trafficking. Moulton’s “most interesting images concerned the soon to be depleted guano itself and the process used to exploit it.” His dramatic photos are the primary source for nearly all the existing photographic evidence of the Islands and the people who worked there, including scenes of the “Great Heap” with workmen loading rail cars, others of craft transporting the cargo to ships and piers, and poignant images of the laborers who Moulton seems to have seen as victims of exploitation. A small church for the workers appears three times; in one the prisoner-laborers are surrounded by armed soldiers while they kneel outside during Sunday services. Gardner’s rich contact prints preserve these minute details and the subtle value transitions captured in Moulton’s negatives.

In April 1864, just before Gardner assembled the album, the Chincha Islands became an object of great concern for the US when Spain seized them “as part of European efforts to re-establish colonial rule in South America while the United States was preoccupied with its Civil War.” He foresaw the historical value of the work when he wrote in his preface “In after times, these sketches of the Chincha Islands will have a peculiar interest [...] The original estimate of the length of time—one thousand years—that this deposit of the Chincha Islands would suffice for the wants of the world, is destined to prove fallacious. So great has become the demand for it that half the deposit of the largest island has been removed already; and the probabilities are, that in twenty years the supply will be exhausted.”

Four copies are recorded in three public collections: the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, and the Public Library of Cincinnati. Two other copies have come to auction in the last 30 years. The most recent, a complete copy offered at Swann, sold for $35,000 in 2012.

$18,000

Isabelle Lausent-Herrera (2009). Tusans (tusheng) and the Changing Chinese Community in Peru. Journal of Chinese Overseas 5: 116.

Keith McElroy (1984). Henry De Witt Moulton: Rays of sunlight from South America. History of Photography, 8:1, 7-21.

De l’extinction de la prostitution: pétition au Sénat, session de 1865

Meugy, Jules. De l’extinction de la prostitution: pétition au Sénat, session de 1865 [...]. Paris: Garnier, n.d., ca. 1865.

Small 8vo, 71, 36 pp.; text followed by 36 pp. catalogue of Garnier Frères, catalogue pages uncut; in printed wrapper with advert, rear wrap abraded at corner.

Full title: De l’extinction de la prostitution. Pétition au sénat, session de 1865. Par le Dr. Jules Meugy, suivie du discours de M. le procureur général Dupin sur le luxe effréné des femmes prononcé à l’occasion de cette pétition.

$65

Les Maladies Sans Nom. Leur Guréison Faciles et Radicale Conseils aux Medales Désespérés.

(Sexual Health) Richard, Charles-Antoin. Les Maladies Sans Nom. Leur Guréison Faciles et Radicale Conseils aux Medales Désespérés. Paris: E. Dentu, [1877]. 6-1/2 x 4-1/2 in., 32 pp.; pink stapled wrappers, light wear.

Richard gives case histories of many diseases, some sexual, healed with either “gouttes régératices” made by Dr. Samuel Thompson or “Granules d’Arséniate” by Dr. Addison. Further research warranted into connection to other arsenic-based treatments for venereal disease.

Parisian holdings cite 46 pages [sic?], North American holdings only at Rochester.

$125

Dealers in Patent Rights, Look To Your Interests!

(Broadside) Dealers in Patent Rights, Look To Your Interests! Buy Lechner & Stump’s Celebrated Combination Patent Pie Rimmer, Crimper and Pastry Cutter, an article of absolute utility in every household. Patented Sept. 11, 1866. Sheridan, PA: Lechner & Stump, [1866?]. Single sheet, 13-⅞ x 7 in.; engraved illus. by “Crossoup-Phila.”

Rare post-Civil War broadside with striking illustration of women and children in the kitchen. Crimper manufactured by Lechner & Stump. Four institutional holdings identified: Emory, Harvard, Library Company Phila., and Winterthur.

$250

Rosalba Carriera per l’inaugurazione delle sale degli autoritratti nella R. Galleria degli Uffizi

Malamani, Vittorio. Rosalba Carriera per l’inaugurazione delle sale degli autoritratti nella R. Galleria degli Uffizi. Rome: Ministero dell’Istruzione Pubblica, 1899. First separate edition. Large 4to, 125 pp.; with illus. facsimile reproductions of Carriera’s letters and 9 plates, most reproducing engravings made after her paintings and pastels, some in color, bound together at rear, contents very good with occasional small marks, pages untrimmed; orig. paper wrpprs. present but separated with significant chipping at edges of both covers, spine lacking. Manuscript presentation inscription on half-title from the author to Riccardo Artoni(?). Together with 3 b/w prints of Carriera’s L’Innocenza (1705; a.k.a. La Giovinetta della Colomba) by Ed. Alinari. Carriera submitted L’Innocenza to the Accademia di San Luca and on the basis of its quality was the first woman admitted to Rome’s all-male academy.

This extract is seemingly the first major monographic work devoted to Rosalba Carriera (1675-1757), and the missing “first edition” to Vittorio Malamani’s later Carriera catalogue (Bergamo: Istituto Italiano d’Arti Grafiche Editore, 1910). Originally published in Le Gallerie nazionali italiane: notizie e documenti 4 (1896-1897), pp. 27-149, it is the first application of modern art historical methods to Carriera’s artwork and career.

On the occasion of the opening of the Uffizi’s new self-portrait gallery, Malamani set out to correct a problem that Carriera’s biographers still encounter: little is known of her early training and her established biography is dependent on both short sentimental elegies published decades after her death and transcriptions of her journals and letters heavily edited by friends, family, and prejudiced translators.

Rare. The 1899 first edition listed by OCLC at only two European institutions, all other holdings are the second edition.

$550

(Sexual Health) Dr. McIntosh’s Natural Uterine Supporter

(Sexual Health) Dr. McIntosh’s Natural Uterine Supporter Company. Dr. McIntosh’s Natural Uterine Supporter [title from front wrapper]. [Chicago]: Dr. McIntosh’s Natural Uterine Supporter Company, n.d., ca. 1876-1882. 8vo, [4] pp.; illus., edges soiled with chips and small closed tears, vertical and lateral creases where formerly folded, fair to good.

Promotional leaflet for a vaginal pessary designed to relieve uterine prolapse. Despite the seeming patent medicine hyperbole, the device is quite similar to modern pessaries.

OCLC finds one example? possibly located at Univ. of Rochester.

$90

Presenting tonight the Queen of Pantomime and Statuesque Grace and Beauty, Miss Cora Neilson [...]

(Theater - Travesty). Broadside advertisement for Sunday afternoon and evening performances at Opera House in Amsterdam, NY, “Presenting tonight the Queen of Pantomime and Statuesque Grace and Beauty, Miss Cora Neilson, in her masterly Impersonation, in the Grand Spectacular Military Drama, French Spy, Or, The Siege of Constantini [...].” Amsterdam, NY: n.d. [1888]. Broadside, approx. 18-½ x 5-½ in.; a few small pinholes and central lateral crease from early fold, very good.

Featuring Cora Neilson in the cross-dressing, cross-ethnic, lead role of the colonial fantasy French Spy, by John Thomas Haines. Originated in London in 1831 by the famed French actress Madame Céleste, it was later popularized by Adah Isaacs Menken. The play follows the heroine Mathilde, disguised as both the mute French colonial soldier Henri and the “Arab boy” Hamet, as she attempts to rescue her father and the French army during the siege of “Constantini.” As Henri, Mathilde kisses a woman, has a “terrific broad-sword” fight with Mohammed, and outwits the Bey of Algiers to deliver the city to the French. The broadside illustrates the moment of combat between Mathilde/Henri and Mohammed, and highlights her gender reveal: “It is a woman.”

Related ads and reviews for the same tour in Arkansas, Ohio, and New Jersey allow us to offer a likely date of 1888.

No copies in WorldCat or the trade as of August 2019.

$275

Album of late 19th Century Albumen or Gelatin-Silver Prints of Gubbio and Perugia

Album of late 19th Century Albumen or Gelatin-Silver Prints of Gubbio and Perugia. [Italy, ca. 1880].

Oblong 4to (8 3/8 x 12 in.) containing [12] heavy card leaves with 22 mounted prints: 13 of which approx. 7 x 9 in. and larger, the rest approx. 6 1/2 x 4 1/2 in.; professional views of artistic or architectural monuments (10), some signed in negative by [Fratelli] Alinari and [James] Anderson, together with amateur views (12); leaves sl. warped through center, a few prints a bit toned or faded but retaining contrast and detail, cloth with gilt title “Roma,” boards worn and corners bumped, printed binder’s ticket: “Encuadernacion, R. Dietsch, Moneda 877.”

Curious photo album, titled “Roma” and bound in Santiago de Chile, but containing images almost entirely from Perugia (with the exception of a view of the Pantheon and a composite image of classical sculpture). The binder, Ricardo Dietsch, was known as “La Alemena,” and was active in Santiago de Chile from at least 1894 until the mid-1920s.

The amateur photography is particularly striking, with many of the major sites of Gubbio, Italy visible in unexpected street scenes. These include city residents participating in the spring folk festival Corsa [or Festa] de Ceri, in which teams race through the city carrying heavy wooden statues of local patron saints. Still others depict busy street scenes; an arresting image of women kneeling in the snow; and soldiers and peasants as they lounge on the walls of the city’s famous Roman theater or walk past its Romanesque palazzos and churches.

$275