The Parent’s Guide. Containing Practical Hints for Family Management.

The Parent’s Guide contains advice on how and when to discipline children, the importance of parental love, the best ways to approach teaching children, and various other domestic topics. The front wrapper advertises that “This Book is one which every Parent, Teacher and Guardian ought to read; it will be found intensely interesting, exceedingly amusing, highly instructive and practical, to Parents it will be found unexceptionable, because of its useful and philosophical ideas. To the Housekeeper because of its truly serviceable remarks on economy, and finally to the bachelor because it awakens in his mind a keen and lively sense of the pure unalloyed pleasure of DOMESTIC TRANQUILITY.” 32 pp. Small octavo. With two illustrations printed on inside of wrappers. Original paper wrappers, stitched, printed with illustration of a family at home. Uniform toning and some foxing to front cover. Lacking lower cover. Some toning to the first and last few leaves, and a bit of foxing, but otherwise clean throughout. Faint pencil signature on verso of title-page, dated July 1932. A good and internally sound copy of a fragile and scarce item. We could not find much information about Allen Peabody in the sources available to us, including dates. In the preface to the present item, however, he describes himself as the child of a very large family and states that he “studied deeply into the true principles of human nature, by and with the science of Phrenology,” (p. 3). Additionally, a report in the 1892 City Documents for Salem, Massachusetts describes Peabody as a “bright, but eccentric person, who was always present at all out-of-doors social gatherings, plying his profession as a phrenologist, and delineating character, with charts, etc., at a small fee for examinations,” (p. 385).OCLC lists only two copies, both in Massachusetts.…