Printed and Manuscript Americana

The First American Color Plate Book

Springland Cottage, Pennsylvania: W. Birch, Decr. 31st., 1800. First edition. Oblong folio. With an engraved vignette title-page by William Barker, hand-colored engraved frontispiece, engraved plan of Philadelphia by Barker, and 26 hand-colored engraved plates, by William and Thomas Birch; letterpress contents leaf at front and letterpress subscriber's list and rare broadside prospectus at rear; plate 11 variant two ("High Street...with the procession in commemoration of the Death of General Washington..."). Full contemporary brown calf, green morocco cover label, decorated in gilt, sometime rebacked, extremities and boards worn soiled; original marbled endpapers; early 20th-century ownership inscription of poet Maria Johns Hammond, Baltimore (1862-1949) on verso of free endpapers and on front blank; vertical creasing to most sheets; small dampstain at center of engraved title-page, offsetting from same; contents leaf dampstained along edges, and with bottom half and fore-edge likely supplied from another copy; light to moderate soiling to plates; short closed tear in lower gutter of plate four ("Arch-street Ferry"); short open tear along crease at bottom of plate 19 ("Library and Surgeons Hall"); plates bound in reverse order beginning after plate 11; in blue cloth case and chemise. Snyder, "William Birch: His Philadelphia Views", pp. 297-305 (in Pennsylvania Magazine of History) and City of Independence, pp. 224-248; Howes B-459 ("dd"); Reese, The Federal Hundred 79 and Stamped with a National Character 1; Evans 38259; Sabin 5530; Deak 228; Bristol B10982 (for prospectus); ESTC W30382 (five locations)

Rare first edition, with rare prospectus, and in contemporary calf, of the first color plate book printed in America--one of the most important viewbooks of an American city. "The Birch set of twenty-eight views within the city was so intensive in the planning and so effective in execution as to make all earlier efforts--no matter how important individually--simply sparks of light in a great void. Birch illumined. His aim was not to commemorate a single event or to show a single new structure, but to record a city...He wanted to portray not only the background for living, but also to show the full quality of that living itself..." (Snyder, COI, p. 224) Birch, an accomplished artist and miniaturist, emigrated to America in 1794, and began almost immediately creating these acclaimed views of Philadelphia, capturing the bustle and rhythm of the then nation's capital, while showing some its most important sites and buildings. "Pride of place in American color plate books must always go to William Birch, whose The City of Philadelphia...was the pioneering work of the genre...It was a remarkably ambitious work at the time, and only a few small individual color plates predate it in American publishing. The book was sufficiently popular for Birch to reissue it in somewhat varying formats in 1804, 1809, and 1828" (Reese). The work was published by subscription, with 156 original subscribers paying the then large sum of $44.50 for bound and colored copies, while bound black and white copies cost $31.

Letterpress and plates on "T. Gilpin & Co." watermarked paper. Watermarks without "Brandywine" that appeared in the second edition. This watermark not listed in Gravell & Walsh.