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First edition of this scarce promotional tract for the city of Lynn, Massachusetts, a photographic view book illustrated with twenty-five albumen photographs by Charles E. Cook, a Massachusetts photographer active between 1870 and 1900. This album begins with a "Historical Sketch" of Lynn, which touches on its settlement and development, agricultural and industrial history, with special attention paid to the shoe trade. The photographs that follow are interspersed between hundreds of advertisements promoting Lynn's growing industrial sector, and depict an array of street views and prominent sites in Lynn. Sites pictured include City Hall, Central Square, Soldiers' Monument, Lover's Leap, Lynn Hotel, Dungeon Rock, Lynn Common, and High Rock. It also includes five photographic advertisements promoting P.P. Tapley & Co. (manufacturers of morocco leather), John Mahon & Sons (shoe manufacturers), and the Bay State Wheel Company. Of particular note is the photograph showing Mrs. Lydia E. Pinkham's Home and Laboratory, where she made her famous "Vegetable Compound," an herbal tonic that promised to relieve menstrual and menopausal symptoms. Pinkham founded her business in 1875 following the bankruptcy of her husband's shoe manufacturing business, and her Vegetable Compound would go on to become one of the best-known patent medicines of the 19th century. The publisher Josiah W. Heal (1841-1925) was a grocer and civic booster for Lynn, Massachusetts, and this work appears to be his sole publication. Photographic Views of Lynn includes an advertisement for the sale of his own business: "For Sale! This Building, with first-class fixtures for Grocery, Provision and Meat Business.Cash Business, $75,000 per Annum!.Will be sold at a bargain, for I am going West." OCLC locates eight copies exhibiting a high degree of bibliographic variability, with copies that largely contain between twenty and twenty-four mounted photographs on seventy-one to ninety-eight unnumbered pages. OCLC 9754754. Oblong quarto. Original brown cloth, upper cover lettered in gilt, printed pastedowns with advertisements. Extremities rubbed, joints weak, boards lightly soiled. Edgewear, light tanning, and soiling to contents, title leaf loose. Still a very good copy of a fragile publication.
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