James Cummins Bookseller

Hanover, New Hampshire: 1859.

Price: $2,250.00

About the item

77 oval salted paper print photographs, each identified (and most signed) in manuscript below the image. Each mounted recto only on 77 sheets of card within a manuscript ruled frame. Each image approx. 4 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches oval. Folio. Among the Earliest Photographically Illustrated College Yearbooks. Original half morocco and brown cloth covered boards, spine divided into compartments with semi-raised bands, tooled and lettered in gilt, marbled endpapers. Spine worn with loss at the top, front joint cracked but cords intact, worn at corners. Scattered minor foxing to the mounts, one card detached at chipped at edges. Provenance: C.H. Stanley (name in gilt on morocco label on the upper cover).

Item #319881

George Kendall Warren (1824-1884) "began his long and prolific photographic career in 1851 in Lowell, Massachusetts, opening one of the city's first daguerreotype studios. He was celebrated for his portraiture and frequently photographed celebrities, and he also specialized in college-album photography. When the portrait business in Lowell began to flag just prior to the Civil War, Warren turned to specializing exclusively in senior class photographs for colleges including Dartmouth, Princeton, Williams, Harvard, Brown, Yale, and Rutgers universities. Encouraged by this success, he opened a studio in Cambridge in 1863 and began an extended project depicting the architecture and campus life at Harvard and around Harvard Square" (http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/artists/2878/george-kendall-warren-american-1834-1884/)

The first 11 images in this yearbook depict faculty members, followed by 66 members of the graduating class. Given the timing, many of these young men would go on to serve in the Civil War. Among those depicted are Roger Sherman Greene (Capt. of Company C, 51st US Colored Volunteers), Fisher Ames Baker (18th Massachusetts, in whose memory Baker Library at Dartmouth is named), William Alfred Barnard (20th Michigan, captured in 1864 and surviving seven months in a Confederate prison), and many more.

This album with provenance to Charles Herbert Stanley (1846-1864), a graduate of the class of 1859, who served in the 2nd Connecticut and died at the Battle of Cold Harbor.