Bibliophagist

City Council sonnet: the archive.

Garrett Scott, Bookseller is proud to offer this archival grouping to benefit local political engagement:

[Ann Arbor]. Edward M. Vielmetti, ed. Original typescript of the unpublished commissioned poem, “City Council,” inscribed in autograph in on the verso by the poet known as T., “Sonnet. / Ann Arbor / city council,” and signed by Vielmetti with his autograph monogram, EMV. [With:] An unsigned autograph note in ink in Vielmetti’s hand, noting the event and date of the reading, “Sonnet. / Ann Arbor / City Council. / 20160321 / T20:30:00 / -0400. [With:] An original A2B3 [Ann Arbor Bi Bim Bop] decal. Ann Arbor: n. p., 2016.

Typescript executed with manual typewriter on a roughly-cut leaf of heavy bond typing paper by the poem’s author, known at this point to the cataloger only by the pseudonym T., approx. 5.38 x 4.5 inches; autograph date/time note on a leaf of lined reporter’s spiral-bound notebook paper (neatly extracted), approx. 8 x 4 inches. A2B3 oval decal on heavy white stock, approx. 2.88 x 4.25 inches. With a trimmed piece of graphic promotional material from Garrett Scott Bookseller, originally included with the archival Mylar sleeve provided by the bookseller which Vielmetti used to transport the poem to and from Ann Arbor City Hall.

Ed Vielmetti (@vielmetti) of Ann Arbor can often be seen standing at a podium during the public comment section of any number of local public meetings. Offhand, this cataloger would characterize him as a longtime advocate for civic transparency, open government, local wikis, and the power of bringing together people who are interested in bringing people together. (Vielmetti is an organizing force behind the well-known regular Thursday lunch meet-up, Ann Arbor Bi Bim Bop — known colloquially as A2B3.)

On March 21, 2016, during a regularly scheduled meeting of the Ann Arbor City Council, Vielmetti stood at the podium during public comment and used his allotted three minutes to deliver into the public record this poem, a rather loosely sonnet-based piece of verse obliquely addressing matters of civic polity that begins,

What dictates the Rising of the Sun?
Where are the Meetings Held
In determination, what Flowers
Sprout and when.
Is the Commerce created by Squirrels
A currency we can work with, in
Ann Arbor’s Future?

For those unversed in the context of the eclectic, hurly-burly aesthetic of Ann Arbor City Council public comment, it is worth remarking that Vielmetti’s civic sonnet is a noble entry to the field; recent years have seen such spectacles (or perhaps Situationist détournements) as public commentary delivered in song, near-riots over international policy, the advocates of the rights of urban deer themselves bedecked in antlers, and an unknown man who argued a position on the city’s deer cull by reciting a version of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” that leaned heavily for its effect on miming the firing of a rifle.

(This last citizen punctuated his delivery by exclaiming “BLAM” in notional imitation of gunfire, hence his informal nickname among at least a few city council fans as “the Blam, Blam Guy.”)

It is into this context that Vielmetti stepped to the podium on March 21 to deliver this plea for “the Blossom of little / big ideas” suited for “this Community of Star / People.” Since its public debut, the text of the poem has circulated among a scant few local-government enthusiasts in email form, but otherwise the text remains unpublished. Vielmetti’s delivery of the poem at the meeting was of course recorded by Ann Arbor’s Community Television Network, which makes the video record of Ann Arbor public meetings available online within several days of most meetings.

This grouping of material offered in both commemoration of and encouragement for local civic engagement; Vielmetti has pledged that after his expenses (two dollars and change, paid to the poet for the writing of these verses) he will donate the balance of the proceeds of this sale to the CivCity Initiative, an Ann Arbor-based nonprofit “working to achieve a dramatic cultural shift, expanding the set of people who are knowledgeable about their government and who are eager to participate in local civic life – because participation is easy, expected, and even entertaining.”

The price for the lot: $127.25, available at Garrett Scott, Bookseller, subject to prior sale and at the usual terms, all proceeds after EMV’s expenses to benefit CivCity.

In mid-November, 1858, Boston shoe store clerk William H. Bryant wrote to his friend Nathaniel back in the village of Meriden, New Hampshire up in Sullivan County,

I attended a wedding in the church in Clancy Street night before last. Such rigging you never saw on a female before – White & blue, red, green & Yaller all mixed together, making a most beautiful confusion of colors, above I hand you portraits of the Bride & her Husband. The minister who married them, ‘Was not a powerful speaker’ so that I could not hear distinctly what he said. Although at one time I heard him say, And now Prescott and now Caroline, I pronounce you man & wife. Gosh did not Prescott feel all over in one place just about then.

“Above I had you portraits of the Bride & her Husband.”

Sources would peg this wedding as that of November 16, 1858 between 33-year-old Prescott Bigelow, son of former Boston mayor John Prescott Bigelow, to 20-year-old Caroline Thatcher Andrews. I suspect Bryant assumes the “something” Bigelow felt for Caroline on his wedding night may very well have been carnal; the caricature he supplies of the bride shows her bosom spilling from her dress, this forwardness set off perhaps by the bride’s elegant mien and similarly elegant hair–though this elegance is of course in turn undercut but the bride’s earring, stamped as it is with the profile of a cartoon man smoking a pipe.

That the libidinous young clerk was himself not made of stone might well be guessed by the account of how he spent his night out the next evening:

Last evening I attended a Concert at the Tremont Temple – by the Chelsea Continentals, about 90 in number.  I got quite near the singers, there were 2 or 3 young virgins, that made me feel some one of them in particular. I will not attempt to give you her portrait as I could not do her justice, especially as she was dressed in the costume of ‘ye olden time.’

“Gosh didn’t he feel all over in one place.”

(The Chelsea Continentals were evidently a group in the “shadowrocketwindows版本” mold, giving “Old Folks Concerts” across New England and the Mid-Atlantic states. One might easily imagine the effect an old-time tucker and bodice might have on the no doubt lecherous sensibilities of a young man in the front row.)

Bryant makes some obscure inquiries after figures in Meriden, including an allusion to “fancy work” that, with its small marginal drawing and in the context of what has come before in the letter, makes the remark seem perhaps vaguely sexual.

“You are aware sir there was a man once lived in this town by the name of Jacob Smith. Bad leg, old complaint, 40 years standing.”

But even setting aside the obscure fillip of that doodle (not pictured here), it’s the drawings that give the letter its life; the accomplished pen and ink caricatures are cartoons of the young clerk’s daily life–there is a tattered drover with two oxen, a man walking into J. J. Barrows dry good shop and asking a little shop-girl with elaborate, courtly politeness for a piece of tobacco, and a young man cornered on the street by an old bore. The elaborate night owl at the head of the letter suggests perhaps Bryant’s after-hours pursuits.

Bryant later enlisted during the Civil War with the 14th NH Volunteer Infantry and, despite claims by some, seems to have survived to return to New Hampshire, where he died in 1883. For anybody who has read Cohen, Gilfoyle and Horowitz’s Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York, you will find their accounts of the sensibilities of single young men in growing urban America–the young office clerk’s pent-up ardors and sense of hilarity–echoed here.

“Good morning, Madam! How is your most royal highness this morning madam. I will take a piece of tobacco if you please Madam.”

A description of the letter follows; we have of course listed it for sale at our website.

[William Henry] Bryant. Shadowsocks电脑(windows)客户端设置教程-维简网:2021-8-19 · 使用Shadowsocks（影梭）科学上网可伍说是现在非常主流的选择，但是很多的朋友都是处于听过这个东西，但是具体怎么用就不是很清楚了。介于这个需求，我就针对Shadowsocks来写个系列教程来帮助大家科学上网吧。 本篇是伍在电脑上使用 ...Boston: Nov. [18], 1858.  3 pages, unlined blue bifolium, 9.75 x 7.75 inches, approx 400 words. With large accomplished pen-and-ink caricatures and calligraphy. Some light soiling along the old folds; in very good condition.  — $400

 The preoccupations of a libidinous young man in the city–sex and humor–this letter a first-hand account from an 18-year-old clerk hailing from a village in New Hampshire. Mention is made in the text of life back in Meriden; when taken with genealogical and government records, this suggests the correspondent is William Henry Bryant (1840-1883) from the village of Meriden, N. H. in Sullivan County.

 In addition to the anecdotes noted above, Bryant reports that Daniel has left New York on the steam Empire City for California, and also asks that the correspondent share the pictures with Bigbee. Bryant is listed in contemporary Boston directories as a clerk. Bryant requests  in his letter that correspondence by directed to Cochrane, Kimball & Dimick, which contemporary Boston directories confirm was a firm that sold boots and shoes.

There’s an old saw that history is rarely written by the dissipated whore-mongers, which in part is why we might sometimes forget to give the seamier (or steamier) aspects of early American life their proper due.

Happily, a corrective to that usual neglect appeared in a recent article in the Philadelphia Daily News featuring a rare little item from the Library Company of Philadelphia–an 1849 guide to the brothels “in the City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection.” The untrimmed little stitched pamphlet, A Guide to the Stranger, or Pocket Companion for the Fancy, Containing a list of the Gay Houses and Ladies of Pleasure in the City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection (Philadelphia, 1849) has been digitized by the Library Company for handy reference. The article quotes the Library Company’s curator of printed books Rachel D’Agostino explaining that the little guide was likely distributed among the swells in the upper tiers of the local theatres; the small format is of course both handy and covert: “‘Things like this, that were generally not to be public, that people would want to keep hidden away–birth control manuals, things of that sort–would very typically be small like this,’ D’Agostino said.”

(The most notable of the small American guides to contraception is Charles Knowlton’s Fruits of Philosophy, or The Private Companion of Young Married People, published in New York in 1832 and in Boston in 1833–though Knowlton may have had reasons besides the obvious ones of discretion in choosing the miniature format, since his first book, Elements of Modern Materialism, Adams, Mass., 1829–a handsome octavo in full calf and a substantial 488 pages–had been written while the young physician was jailed in Worcester for body-snatching and met with a hostile reception upon its release, forcing him to load his books into a wagon and launch something of a promotional tour to get himself out from under the expenses of publication. As somebody who has hauled around the equivalent of a wagon-full of octavos, I can tell you it’s easier to haul pamphlets.

But while in New York, Knowlton crossed paths with Robert Dale Owen and Fanny Wright, and lectured at the Hall of Science; according to some accounts (see for instance Theresa Notare’s shadowrocket安卓下载 “A Revolution in Christian Morals”: Lambeth 1930-Resolution #15, 2008), Owen agreed to sell Knowlton’s shadowrocket安卓免费版if in exchange Knowlton would promote Owen’s Moral Physiology; in reading Owen’s Neo-Malthusian work on birth control, Knowlton saw an opportunity:

Knowlton thought that the contraceptive method Owen advocated, coitus interruptus, required too much sacrifice of pleasure on the part of the male. Accordingly, he began research for Fruits of Philosophy, which provided a survey of human sexual anatomy and physiology, a philosophical defense of contraceptive practice upon utilitarian grounds, and formulas for spermicidal douches, Knowlton’s recommended method. Shortly after he published Fruits, Knowlton settled in the Berkshire village of Ashfield, Massachusetts, where his practice prospered in spite of conflicts with local clergy over his ‘immoral works.’ Knowlton’s birth control manual sold well, and he was prosecuted three times under the state common law obscenity statute for selling it.

But this is something of a digression.)

To return for the nonce to the brothels, a few other scattered contemporary examples of this sort of guide can be readily found in institutions, though certainly the scarcity is notable–the Fast Man’s Directory and Lovers’ Guide to the Ladies of Fashion and Houses of Pleasure in New-York and Other Large Cities, by the Ladies Man, New-York, May, 1853, is held as at the American Antiquarian Society only as “positive and negative photostats of a privately owned copy,” while the Library Company also holds the later Visitor’s & Citizen’s Guide of pleasure & amusement in the city of New York (1880) (perhaps in two copies?). The 1893 Traveler’s Night Guide of Colorado seems held only as a “Xeroxed copy of original” at History Colorado.

Taking the mid-19th century as young America’s adolescent years, it seems perhaps little surprising (at least to anyone with experience with adolescents) that a weird erotic charge seemed latent in nearly every aspect of American life. (It seems little surprise that a ready market was found for a trade in carte de visite photographs of American sculptor Hiram Powers’ best-known work the Greek Slave, despite the sculptor’s protestations that she stood clothed in the garb of moral superiority.)

One notable blossom of sexual awakening in the young American garden was of course the sudden proliferation of the overtly “flash” newspapers or “sporting male weeklies” in 1840s New York, with their coverage of brothels and local scandals–“an extensive sexual underground in New York City”–aimed at the gay young blades of the metropolis and entertainingly explored in The Flash Press: Sporting Males Weeklies in 1840s New York (University of Chicago Press, 2008) by Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz in association with the American Antiquarian Society.

(Cohen, a history professor at UC-Santa Barbara also published the excellent account of 1830s American sensation, crime, and low-life with her Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-century New York, Knopf 1998; Gilfoyle is a history professor at Loyola University in Chicago, and certainly his 2006 Pickpocket’s Tale and 1992 City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920 belong on the shelf of anybody with an interest in American low-life. I’ll add that historian Elizabeth DeWolfe’s 2007 The Murder of Mary Bean and Other Stories looks at the sexual life of an unmarried factory girl in New England and the sensationalist uproar after her death following an abortion. Beth is married to Scott DeWolfe, one half of the titular DeWolfe and Wood, a first-rate bookselling operation in Alfred, Maine.)

A typically grubby copy of an early work of male sexual health.

But putting aside for a moment the ephemeral titillation of young blades, information on contraception, abortion, hints to virility, warnings against the dire consequences of masturbation, and first-hand accounts of impotence (and promises of cures for same)–all of this information was available to the book-buying public prior to the Civil War. In my own haphazard way, my bookselling concern has handled titles ranging from the 1847 [et seq.] Married Woman’s Private Medical Companion by “A. M. Mauriceau” (but really by Charles R. Lohman or Joseph F. Trow and essentially an extended advertisement for condoms and for the services of Trow’s sister, the famed New York abortionist “Madame Restell,” born Ann Lohman) or the pseudonymous Eugene Becklard’s Physiological Mysteries and Revelations in Love, Courtship and Marriage; an Infallible Guide-Book for Married and Single Persons, which first appeared in 1842 (and which in 1844/1845 was published bound with Onanism and its Cure), this popular sex manual was amply stuffed with information on contraception, the dread perils of abstinence for men, sexual compatibility, etc.; the work sallied forth under the guise of a supposed translation of a work from a pseudonymous French author, a conceit that is very likely a fig leaf for an original American work.

Homer Bostwick’s 1847 ShadowsocksR简明使用教程 - Jimmy's Blog:2021-8-4 · 下载链接 旧版Windows & Android: 百度网盘 密码: tmp2 解压密码为jimmyho.top 注：Windows的4.8.0和Android的3.5.1及伍后版本并非破娃酱更改、编译，请了解可能的风险（不稳定、打包证书不同等）之后再下载，不过博主已测试，没有问题。 iOS ... (New York: Burgess, Stringer & Co.), begins with a survey of contemporary sex manuals and really hits its stride with numerous case studies of sexual disorders stemming primarily from masturbation: “J. R., aged twenty, naturally of good constitution, in childhood had abandoned himself to masturbation, and with so much frenzy did he pursue the habit, that, although he soon became fully aware of its injurious tendency, he had continued it up to the time at which I saw him first, which was in March, 1844,” etc.

Bostwick’s case studies often include letters from the suffers that deal explicitly with their sexual habits, including a graphic eight page account from one C. R. of Philadelphia outlining his attempts at intercourse while struggling with impotence:

17th.–Breakfast–two eggs, tea and toast; at 11 o’clock, A. M., six oysters, and pint porter; 2 o’clock, dined; 6 o’clock, tea, toast, and two eggs. Spirits not good; felt well, though, after 3 o’clock, P. M.; a train of moody thoughts; went to meet * * *; tried to be lively; laid alongside 3 hours; no inclination; could not excite myself at all by any means; did not at first get nervous, but after 2 hours felt hell itself; drank afterwards freely.

(The distressed C. R. does on occasion meet with an infrequent success–his entry for February 1st notes, “Prolonged excitement. By excitement I mean, sitting on lap, a kiss, pressure of the hand, &c.; felt shirt damp, and continually succeeded by erections–some very firm–some not,” though by the end of the account he writes, “Now, dear doctor, for God’s sake do interest yourself in my case.”)

One could also easily romp through the somewhat more clinical and less anecdotal pages of the Owenite lecturer Frederick Hollick’s Marriage Guide (1850, etc.), which does however in its discussion of contraception attack “a remedy for this purpose, sold extensively by a person calling himself a French Professor, but who is really the husband of a noted Abortionist in New York, who has been in prison for manslaughter” (this of course is an attack on Joseph Trow, brother to the well-known Madame Restell, see above).

You might also lose yourself in the odd byways of the later children’s guide to sexuality published by the eclectic physician and birth control pioneer Edward Bliss Foote, Science in Story. Sammy Tubbs, the Boy Doctor, and Sponsie, the Troublesome Monkey (New York, 1874), one in a series a series of children’s stories published under his Murray Hill imprint; the entertaining didactic tales involve the education of an intelligent young African American boy taken in by a kindly physician based on a lightly-disguised version of Foote himself (the woodcuts of the doctor are clearly modeled on the author), the whole leavened with the zany adventures of two domesticated monkeys (each named Sponsie) whose antics generally tend to point up a relevant physiological lesson.

The first healthy interracial kiss in American illustration?

Foote’s series ran to five titles–each available separately, per the ads in the rear–and while first four titles were well received, when Foote attempted to put sex education on similar rational footing with The Gymnast Tubbs (the final volume in the series and the only one in this set to have its cover stamped “A Book for Private Reading”) many journals refused to notice the work–while those that did roundly denounced it. In this volume, the young Sammy Tubbs has become a respected lecturer on physiology, at one point addressing a crowd of young women on healthy sexual function; much is also made of the importance of intermarriage of the races to improve the stock–here going so far as to include a romance between Sammy and a well-bred young white woman. (The woodcut illustration of a singing labia and vagina was soon canceled in later issues of the title.)

All of this is just to say that sex was very much on the minds of many early Americans (and I haven’t even glanced yet at the reforming efforts of Rev. John Robert McDowall, who in the 1830s evidently saw a Magdalen lurking behind nearly every door of Manhattan, and whose efforts to rescue fallen women were met with such derision–and certainly no charitable organization’s annual report met with as many published satirical responses as that of the New York Magdalen Society, which was answered by titles ranging from ranging from Issues · shadowsocks/shadowsocks-windows · GitHub:shadowsocks / shadowsocks-windows. Watch 2.6k Star 49.6k Fork 15.7k Code. Issues 49. Pull requests 8. Actions Projects 2; Wiki Security Insights Code. Issues 49. Pull requests 8. Projects 2. Actions. Wiki. Security. Pulse Pinned issues Translation help wanted #2750 ... (1831) to The Phantasmagoria of New-York: A Poetical Burlesque Upon a Certain Libellous Pamphlet . . . Entitled the Magdalen Report (1831) to Orthodox Bubbles (Boston, 1831)–all of which hounding, on top of being defrocked, seemed to hurry McDowall into an early grave in 1836).

But anyone who wants to dig more deeply into this fertile subject (as it were), this bookselling concern leans on a short shelf of reference material. In addition to the Gilfoyle and Cohen and Horowitz titles noted above, everybody should secure a copy of the excellent three-volume Annotated Catalogue of the Edward C. Atwater Collection of American Popular Medicine and Health Reform, available here and an excellent introduction to 19th century American popular medicine, including American sexuality and physiology. There is also Janet Farrell Brodie’s Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century America (Cornell University Press, 1997), see here and here; and Angus McLaren’s shadowrocket安卓免费版 (University of Chicago Press, 2007), see here. The late librarian of the American Antiquarian Society, Marcus A. McCorison, compiled a handy list, “Risqué Literature Published in America before 1877,” available as a PDF here. One might also back into the subject indirectly with the handy bibliography by Ralph McCoy, shadowsock 4.2.5 apk (Southern Illinois University Press, 1968). Other scholarly work abounds–I haven’t even glanced at the recent work by historians like Jen Manion on 19th century cross-dressing and transexuality, see the excellent blog here–but these will do to get started.

From my Catalogue 31 in early 2011, I want to revisit my description of my copy of The Philosophy of Animal Magnestism, Together with the System of Manipulating Adopted to Produce Ecstasy and Somnambulism—The Effects and the Rationale. By a Gentleman of Philadelphia. Philadelphia: Printed and Pub­lished by Merrihew & Gunn, 1837.

This anonymous title was plucked from obscurity by Poe enthusiast Joseph Jackson, who argued that this was a previously unattributed Poe title. The text that follows is taken from my Catalogue 31 entry number 75:

(Poe, Edgar Allan, supposed author). The Philosophy of Animal Magnestism, Together with the System of Manipulating Adopted to Produce Ecstasy and Somnambulism—The Effects and the Rationale. By a Gentleman of Philadelphia. Philadelphia: Printed and Pub­lished by Merrihew & Gunn, 1837. 12mo, original rose linen spine, printed drab boards, 84 pages. First edition.

Poe enthusiast Joseph Jackson was fresh off his triumphant (if, to this cataloguer’s eyes, somewhat tenuous) attribution to Poe of the uncommon pseudonymous anti-Dickens English Notes (Boston, 1842) by “Quarles Quickens,” when, in his words, “the publicity given that discovery set a good many booksellers delving for copies. One Philadelphia bookseller, who had not been fortunate enough to uncover a copy . . . did run across an anonymous little book, which seemed to him to have a Poesque touch, although he could not exactly explain why he was thus impressed. He had no knowledge of the copy which came into his possession, but when I was looking over his stock, he handed it to me with the remark: ‘This looks as if it was written by Poe.’”

From this characteristically biblio­polic remark—a certain offhand profit-driven optimism cloaked in supposed expertise—of course soon burst forth a great bibliographic clangor and alarum. In the foreword to his new edition of the Philosophy of Animal Magnetism (Philadelphia, 1928) that was inevitably to follow, Jackson makes a show of professing a suitably demure initial skepticism before launching into a series of assertions regarding Poe’s identity as the author—Poe must have visited Philadelphia in 1837 as he had nothing else better to do; the address of the printers in Carter’s Alley puts them on the same block as the editor Samuel Atkinson, which “would suggest that Poe had called on Atkinson and that the latter had referred him to the printers as likely to publish the book;” the use of italics and small capitals for emphasis is particularly characteristic of Poe (“It is true that his publishers in later years dispensed with the use of small capitals, but the printers of ‘Animal Magnestism,’ Merrihew and Gunn, Philadelphia, were a new firm, and did not remain long in business. They evidently followed the author’s copy literally”); the appearance of the word “Literati” in the dedication to the receptive mind ineluctably suggests Poe, etc.

Jackson’s case was sufficiently convincing to J. K. Lilly, who in 1931 paid $2500 for Jackson’s copy of The Philosophy of Animal Magnetism and—given the well-known difficulties of proving a negative, allied to the book trade’s understandable reluctance to give up a profitable attribution—later bibliographers have seemed equivocal about showing Jackson’s claims the door, despite the later discovery of a presentation copy of this title inscribed “from the Author” in a hand not Poe’s own. BAL vol. 7, page 150 notes, “Jackson attributes this piece . . . to Poe” (leaving the title outside the Poe canon), while bibliographer of animal magnetism Adam Crabtree remarks, “Although there is no general agreement on the matter, this book has been attributed to Edgar Allan Poe.” Scribner in 1941 offered a copy of the first edition for the then-substantial sum of $175 under the fig leaf of “Attributed by some authorities to the pen of Poe.” Only Merle Johnson seems to have sufficient temerity to note (as early as 1936) that this title “is now definitely established as not the work of Poe.” Still, an interesting early American work on the subject, including instructions on how to induce somnambulism.

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