"Picturesque America" First Edition Vols. I & II, William Cullen Bryant

North America, United States, New York. A complete two-volume set of "Picturesque America; or, The Land We Live In," edited by William Cullen Bryant and issued by D. Appleton and Company of New York. Each heavy folio is bound in deep blue with raised bands on the spine and gilt lettering. The front boards are embossed with dense arabesque scrollwork around an arched panel, and the gilt title curls around a painter's palette and brushes. The page edges are gilt, and marbled endpapers show at the hinges. Inside, essays on the nation's coasts, rivers, mountains, and cities are paired with steel-engraved plates and hundreds of wood engravings. The volumes travel from the coast of Maine to Yosemite and from Charleston to Chicago, a parlor-table survey of the American landscape after the Civil War. Picturesque America began as a series of illustrated travel features in Appleton's Journal. Appleton then expanded it into a book that set out, in the words of its preface, to give "full descriptions and elaborate pictorial delineations of the scenery characteristic of all the different parts of our country." The editor named on the title page was the poet William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), long the editor of the New York Evening Post. The format anticipated the publisher's later companion work, Picturesque Europe. The set contains about fifty steel engravings and some nine hundred wood engravings after the leading landscape draftsmen of the day. Harry Fenn and his friend Douglas Woodward drew most of them, joined by Thomas Moran, John Frederick Kensett, Worthington Whittredge, Jules Tavernier, Alfred Rudolph Waud, Granville Perkins, James David Smillie, and others. The steel plates were cut by specialists including Robert Hinshelwood (1812-1885), an Edinburgh-born engraver who also produced banknote plates for the Continental Bank Note Company, as well as Samuel Valentine Hunt, William Wellstood, and Edward Paxman Brandard. The work was sold by subscription. Parts were mailed to subscribers twice a month and bound into volumes once the set was complete, in bindings that ranged from cloth to full morocco with elaborate tooling. The finished set was meant to be displayed. Historians credit its images with encouraging American tourism and the early historic preservation movement. Sue Rainey, in her 2001 study of the work, called it "the first publication to celebrate the entire continental nation," one that helped Americans after the Civil War build a national self-image based on reconciliation between North and South and the incorporation of the West. Item # 205576

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