RHYMES FROM DIFFERENT CLIMES

Boston: Cornhill Company, 1918. 1st Edition (Limited). Hardcover. Scarce, privately published collection of poems and other letters and musings from 1894 to 1918 by Mary M. Bergholz (1839 -1926) of Waterbury Center VT about her life and foreign travels to visit her son Leo on his assignments as US consul in various stations in Canada, Armenia and Turkey. She dedicates the collection to him in a curiously doting way, acknowledging he did not favor publication. (Leo's father died in 1901, and clearly the son filled the void. Leo [1857 1945] played a central role in passing on intelligence from his post in Dresden in 1917 about German Uboat and submarine warfare strategies to the State Department that may have figured into bringing the US into the war.) OCLC identifies copies in only 6 US libraries. 8vo, paper-backed covers with paper label over parchment spine, decorated endpaper, gte, sides untrimmed, 52 pages. Watermarked, hand-made Umbira paper from the Cornhill Company. Printed by the Seaver-Howland Press, 271 Franklin St, Boston, with its imprint with whale-on waves device verso colophon in rear. (Howland being a whaler-owner family of New Bedford.) Pasted onto the ffe in shaky hand dated 1925 (the author died in 1926) is an inscription: "Dear friends of mine accept these poems as a token of love from me and when you scan the pages o'er think of your friend Mary M B. June thirteenth1925" Boards moderately soiled, lightly stained, corners worn, incidental foxing in a few spots, solidly bound. A unique, almost end-of-life view of the world from a 19thC American woman, only ostensibly defined as mother of a successful son. VG-. Item #011194

Price: $250.00

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