one of my favorite pieces ever in the shop, here

sweet conjunction of numbers

right now, at 7:16 a.m. on the 8th of March, 2013:
there are 226 items for sale in the luncheonette.
there are 1246 positive feedbacks (thanks so much, everyone!)
there are 2246 total sales

to celebrate, a coupon: lunchforbreakfast 
25% off.

Hoffman's Albany Directory for 1842-1843

Green paper over boards with leather spine.

What remains of the leather spine, from the back.

Filled with fine and glorious engraving.

Seems to have been owned by the County Clerk's Office of Albany. Look at that penmanship.

Scattergood & Sons. Best name.

In 1842-1843, March 8 fell on a Wednesday.

List of the city's public nurses and their addresses.

The widow Martha Cooley, the widow Margaret Cooper.

Directory of Franklin and Franklin Falls, New Hampshire, 1881.

Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York, 1861. By D.T. Valentine
update: we just found  the other half of this book in another box. What's here is only a partial. There's 300 pages more. 

Half of the book sits here. The other half is now being remarried to it. A stirring document, an amazingly thorough, totally obsessive, administratively caffeinated record of New York City as it grew. The book has its original brown cloth. The gold is the official arms of New York City.

The foldout maps were found this way, having cracked along the folds.

It's an ex-libris edition that belonged to a New Yorker.

The title page has a 3-D effect, as if you're about to embark on a remarkable journey. Illustrations are colored like this throughout. There's a transcript of the index to the illustrations here. Obsessiveness breeds obsessiveness.

Another foldout, the paper cracked along the creases.

The engravings carry through that 3-D effect. Beautifully lettered caption. This is one of the first illustrated histories of the city.

D.T. Valentine was the Common Council's deputy clerk who copiously researched and assembled these books on his own. He was the first to compile and assemble official documents of record like this.

A careful, correct diagram of the councilmen's chamber is followed by signatures of all its members.

Manhattan, Second Avenue and 42nd Street.

City Hall looking like a palace of all things right and civilized.

The firemen on parade.

New England Mercantile Union Business Directory: Six Parts in One. 1849

Published by Pratt & Company.

Love the typography of the title page, the way the middle text spreads like eagle wings.

This copy has three of the six maps: Rhode Island, Vermont, and Maine.

...collected by the most competent men to be procured, who have carefully canvassed every town and city...

Someone wrote a rather childlike little essay about Vermont in the memorandum, in pencil, that looks like it was copied verbatim from another book.

There was one law school in New England then, Harvard. Seven medical schools.

Brewers to Carriage Smiths.