The Poetry of Travel…

This book is a must for the literary traveller. Published in 1876, this photographic guide takes its readers through the Cambridge, Massachusetts area on a guided tour of places associated with her great poets, Holmes, Lowell and Longfellow! I wonder how many of them have been preserved? Well, never mind. This book has photographs!

William James Stillman (1828-1901), the photographer, was what we would now call a photojournalist, diplomat and historian. He studied art, and painted landscapes while based in Upper Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks before moving to Cambridge. Stillman also travelled widely in Europe, especially in England, where he forged acquaintance with Ruskin, Turner, and Rossetti. These friendships earned him the moniker, ‘The American Pre-Raphaelite’. This book also forms a portion of a larger work published in the same year, Poetic Localities: Photographs of Adirondacks, Cambridge, Crete, Italy, Athens.

Stillman, W. J., editor. Poetic Localities of Cambridge Illustrated. Boston, James R. Osgood, 1876. Red-brown cloth over bevelled boards, front cover gilt-stamped illustration of a house with title and border stamped in black; title, etc., gilt-stamped to spine; a.e.g. Head and tail of spine softened and wrinkled with minor colour loss, corner tips worn a bit. First blank has p.o.n., note of gift and date (Birkenhurst, Jan. 16th, ’76) in contemporary hand, else pages clean with only the faintest hint of aging present. Binding tight. A VG+ copy. ECB10922  $100.00