51 A REVOLUTIONARYWAR STORY OF GREAT RARITY,


PUBLISHED TO PROMOTE ONE OF THE LEADING NORTH AMERICAN EXPERIMENTAL FARMS


185.MOUNT HOPE FARM (publisher). Mount Hope; a Story of Williamstown, Massachusetts during the Revolutionary War. Williamstown: The McClelland Press for Mount Hope Farm, [?1937].


£450


12mo (152 x 87mm). Original black wrappers, printed in gold on the upper panel with title, border, and publisher’s device, stapled as issued; pp. 47, [1 (imprint)]; half- tone frontispiece of ‘The Lions’ Gate. Entrance to Mount Hope’; wrappers a little creased causing slight loss of gilt on upper panel, text ll. creased, nonethless a very good copy of a rare item; provenance: Percy Whiting Brown.


First and only edition. Mount Hope Farm was created by E. Parmelee Prentice and his wife Alta (daughter of John D. Rockefeller Sr) from four smaller farms and the associated land in 1910, and by the time that this work was published it had become one of the leading experimental farms in the United


States and achieved an international reputation. This volume, apparently produced for promotional purposes, opens with a list of awards granted to Mount Hope Farm by the American, Italian and Bulgarian governments between 1924 and 1936, before describing the Farm’s teaching activities and giving brief accounts of its herd, its products, and publications (the latest dated August 1936). The ‘Story’ proper begins on p. 13, and is related in the first person by Gardiner Hardee (b. 1764), whose grandfather lived in Colchester, Connecticut, and whose father graduated from college in 1758, sailing to Britain later that year, to study medicine at Edinburgh, where he remained until 1775 when imminent political upheaval caused him to return to America. The following year, the narrator and his mother sailed from France to New York, to join the father in Williamstown, Massachusetts; however, his mother died on the journey and the mounting troubles caused the ship’s captain to dock at New London, Connecticut, rather than New York, so the narrator made his own way back to Mount Hope farm, only to find that his father had left for New York, to meet the boat there. The text then recounts the military actions around Williamstown and the narrator’s participation in them, his work on the farm, and his eventual reunion with his father. The ‘Story’ is anonymous, and this ephemeral pamphlet seems to be very rare: no copy can be traced in UK libraries via COPAC, and WorldCat only records one copy in North America, at Williams College Library, Williamstown.


186. MULLINS, John & Sons. The Divining Rod. Its History, Truthfulness and Practical Utility. Bath: J. & H.W. Mullins. 1914. £60


8vo. Original green gilt cloth; pp. 104, with several black and white plates includingadvertisements for Mullins’s products; very good.


First edition. A fascinating document, part trade catalogue, part history, tracing the use of divining rods to find water and, in particular, the Mullins family’s prowess in this ancient art. Mullins obviously had no difficulty in finding business; his client list, printed at the front of this book, includes eight dukes, eight earls and most of the rest of Debrett’s.


187.MURPHY, Dervla. On a Shoestring to Coorg. An Experiences of South India. London: Cox & Wyman Ltd. for John Murray, 1976. £30


8vo (215 x 137mm). Original green boards, spine lettered in gilt, dustwrapper with design after Ray Evans, retaining price; pp. [8 (half- title, other works on verso, title, publication details on verso, dedications, epigraph, contents, and acknowledgements)], 261, [1 (blank)], [2 (blank l.)]; one double-page map printed on heavy green stock and one full-page map in the text; very light fading on spine of wrapper, very light fading on spine-ends, nonetheless a very good copy.


First edition. ‘Dervla Murphy arrrived by chance in Coorg, once the smallest province of British India. Lying betwen the Malabar coast and the Carnaptic, it is a tranquil, blessedly undeveloped mountain land of dense forests, wide paddy fields, neat coffee plantations and handsome, hospitable people. Here the author and her daughter settled down happily and from their base in a remote, traditional “ancestral home” had an opportunity to learn something about Coorg customs, ceremonies and attitudes which in many respects are unique’ (dustwrapper blurb).


186 187


‘A REMARKABLE ACHIEVEMENT IN POLAR EXPLORATION’


188. NANSEN, Fridtjof. “Farthest North” being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship Fram 1893-96 and of a Fifteen Months’ Sleigh Journey by Dr. Nansen and Lieut. Johansen with an Appendix by Otto Sverdrup Captain of the Fram. London: Harrison and Sons for George Newnes, Ltd., 1898.


£295


8vo (230 x 158mm), 2 volumes. Contemporary half red roan over grained cloth, spines gilt in compartments and lettered in one, all edges sprinkled red; pp. I: xv, [1 (blank)], 480; II: viii, 456; half-title in volume I (not called for in II), portrait frontispiece in volume I and monochrome frontispiece in II, 64 monochrome plates, one colour-printed plate, one colour-printed folding map by John Bartholomew & Co., monochrome illustrations and diagrams, 46 full-page, one full-page map, and letterpress tables in the text; extremities slightly rubbed, light mark on lower board of vol. I, some offsetting on free endpapers and first and last ll. of text, colour plate trimmed affecting caption, slight trace of adhesive on I, p. 289, map with very short and skilfully-repaired marginal tear, short marginal tears with old repairs on II, B1v, nonetheless a very good and clean set in a contemporary binding.


Second English edition. First published in Norway under the title Fram over polhavet, den norske polarfaerd 1893-1896 (Oslo: 1896-1897), the first English edition was published in 1897 and this, the second, in the following year. The work is a ‘narrative of the First Fram Expedition, 1893-1896, led by Nansen, with the object of investigating the polar basin north of Eurasia by drifting in the ice with the currents northwest from the New Siberian Islands across or near the pole [and] contains descriptions of the voyage in the Fram from northern Norway July 1893, across the Kara Sea to the New Siberian Islands and the drift thence across the polar sea, Sept. 1893-March 1895. [It] includes [an] account of Nansen’s and Johansen’s sledge journey toward the North Pole, their wintering on Franz Josef’s Land and trip home, March 1895-Aug. 1896, with excerpts from Nansen’s diary; also a supplement by Otto Sverdrup on the Fram’s drift in the ice, March 1895-Aug. 1896’ (Arctic Bibliography, 11983).


Cf. Arctic Bibliography 11983 (1st US ed.); NMM I, 991 (1st English ed.); PMM 384 (1st ed.: ‘A remarkable achievement in polar exploration’).


188


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