Rare Book Monthly
Book Catalogue Reviews - June - 2007 Issue
A Wide Selection of Americana from Almagre Books
Theodore Roosevelt meets Silver Echo Tabor. Courtesy Denver Public Library.
Item 134 is a printing of that song, Our President Roosevelt's Colorado Hunt. March Song to the Memory of the Late U.S. Senator H.A.W. Tabor. Words by Silver Echo Tabor. Dedicated to My Beloved Father H.A.W. Tabor. Two years later, Silver Echo would get to meet Roosevelt. After that it was all downhill. While her mother drifted into isolation in her bitter cold mine shack, Silver Echo fell into alcoholism. She moved to Chicago hoping to jumpstart her writing career, but continued her downward spiral of drugs and alcohol, and took up with some undesirable men, the last of whom murdered her in 1925 with scalding water. Baby Doe refused to recognize her daughter's death, claiming she lived in a monastery. Silver Echo's ode to T.R., published in Denver in 1908, is priced at $350.
Item 487 is a less unusual Roosevelt item. It is a Message of the President of the United States, published in 1901. This is the first printing of Roosevelt's first speech to Congress as President, following the assassination of William McKinley. $50.
Item 3 is an extremely obscure item dealing with race in America. Privately published by the Colt Press in 1941 in an edition limited to 100 copies, it is entitled Negroes of America. The author of this call for better race relations was Tommy Bransten, all of ten years old at the time. The book is inscribed by the youthful author to "billy and clink" (the printer and her husband). $250.
Item 91 is a trade promotional: Cooper's Cattle Dip: The Tick Dip of Nations. It is filled with testimonials to this wondrous cattle dip, and contains a picture of former President William Howard Taft, large as a cow himself, observing a cattle dipping. Published in 1917. $100.
Item 507 is an 1878 work by Robert Dunlap Clarke, The Works of Sitting Bull in the Original French and Latin, with Translations, Diligently Compared. If you are wondering where on earth Sitting Bull learned these languages, the answer is Oxford, of course. This book was a magnificent fraud perpetrated by Clarke, but it led to many misconceptions about the great Chief's background over the years. $1,750.
Item 560 provides another strange claim. John Hanson's 1854 book is entitled The Lost Prince, Facts Tending to Prove the Identity of Louis the Seventeenth, of France, and the Rev. Eleazar Williams, Missionary Among the Indians of North America. Louis XVII was the Anastasia of his day. Young Louis, the Dauphin, was just six years old when the French Revolution began, eight when his father, Louis XVI, was sent to the guillotine. The young prince was imprisoned under deplorable and humiliating conditions for anyone, much less an eight year old. In poor health from disease, he died in 1795 at the age of ten. However, for many years, numerous pretenders stepped to the fore claiming to be the lost prince. Eleazar Williams was one of the more unlikely candidates, but as the story went, Louis was somehow smuggled out of France to be raised in America by Iroquois Indians. $225.
Almagre Books may be reached at 505-989-9462, or wwroth@kiva.net.
