This is a very large and beautiful version of the U.S. “letters patent” document, with an elegant engraved eagle, the calligraphic blazon “The United States of America,” and a handsome engraving of the Patent Office building in Washington (drawn by A.A. von Schmidt and engraved by W.H. Dougal) occupying almost the entire top half of the first page.

Henderson's story as an inventor, involving emigration from England, “field work” building railway bridges in Chile, and residence in the late-19th-century U.S. industrial centers of Baltimore and Philadelphia, is interesting both as individual and asrepresentative of American inventors' careers in a very inventive era.

•  Henderson's papers are held at the Hagley Museum, & Library, Wilmington, DE: see, https://invention.si.edu/william-m-henderson-papers-1847-1893.   Laced together with a light blue silk ribbon; folded. Some foxing, especially on drawing; soiling on exterior fold with traces elsewhere; and spotting to ribbon and blue-green wafer.  (8638)

Vol. I opens with a rather nice mezzotint portrait of Wirt, engraved by A.B. Walter after Charles B. King; vol. II with an oversized, folding facsimile of a letter from John Adams.

•  BAL 11056; Cohen 2161; Howes K87; Sabin 37415.   Publisher's brown cloth, covers framed in blind-stamped strapwork, spines with gilt-stamped title and blind-stamped decorations; cloth lightly dust-soiled, chipped at corners and spine extremities. Ex–social club library: 19th-century bookplates, call number on endpapers, rubber-stamp on title-pages. Vol. II: one leaf of contents with two short tears. Pages clean.  (29413)

•  BAL 14856; Shaw & Shoemaker 48824; Wegelin 1066. On Neal, see: Dictionary of American Biography, XIII, 398–99. Period-style quarter tan cloth over light blue paper–covered boards, spine with printed paper label. Dedication page and a few others (not including title) stamped by a now-defunct institution. Waterstaining to upper margins and some inner page parts, with final leaves darkened and a few spotted with foxing. Some upper edges chipped; final leaf with inner margin repaired.  (13727)

A pencilled annotation in one margin of this copy reads “The author is not aware that the people in the Southern States are not called Yankees”; one particularly anti-American remark later in the volume has been lined through in pencil.

•  Sabin 27570; Howes S1115.   Publisher's speckled sheep, spine with gilt-stamped leather title-label; covers sunned unevenly, edge/extremities rubbed, head of spine showing traces of now-absent label. Ex–social club library: 19th-century bookplate on front pastedown, front free endpaper lacking, pressure-stamp on title-page. Title-page with supposed author's name inked in upper margin. Waterstaining to lower outer corners of first few leaves; scattered spots of foxing and staining; one signature much browned, showing the different effects of time and “life” on different papers.  (26376)