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Issued in a small number of typescripts for private circulation. An extraordinary short history and summary of several interesting cases that occurred in the New York Branch of the Office of Naval Intelligence, compiled by Hollis H. Hunnewell, Voluntary Aide with other staff members for Lieutenant-Commander Spencer Eddy, Officer-in-Charge. It covers an important era of development, when the ONI (the oldest member of the US intelligence network) was tasked with espionage in monitoring foreign threats, both in naval affairs and domestically, detecting hostile acts among non-American communities, and acting as censor for cable communications. Though the author states in the inserted letter ‘I must lay stress on the fact that these pages are strictly confidential in nature, and for your own personal use’, the books seems, in retrospect, to be a rather reckless exposition of the Office’s actvities.
It is both serious and comical, with the the first half of its text setting out the history and aims of the ONS, its personnel and departmental structure, and the second half presenting a series of humorous anecdotes. The Office’s departments comprised: the executive and the espionage departments together with departments for: cables, plant protection, commercial, banking, Latin-American, I.W.W (for surveillance of the unions or ‘Industrial Workers of the World’), Russian and Czecho-Slovak, legal and file. A paragraph each describes their remit and a photographic copy of a flow-chart diagram explains the procedure of communication between agents and officers. A list of officers (including Eddy and Hunnewell) is provided, comprising voluntary aides, agents, enlisted men, enlisted men detailed to the Postal Censorship Office, enlisted women, civilians, telephone officers. The text then becomes an account of humorous mistakes and misunderstandings, presumably for the amusement of former members of the office. These are accompanied by well-known illustrator Maginel Wright Enright’s lighthearted vignettes (presumably commissioned for this account) which would be charming except for one obviously racist caricature accompanying an equally racist anecdote. There are two stories of botched espionage attempts using dictographs: one in which the apparatus was hidden in what was thought to be a disused fireplace in the home of a suspect (with predictable consequences) and another in which agents pick up only sounds of an amorous encounter between and agent and a suspect.
Worldcat locates two copies one at Georgetown University, the other in the US Naval War College Library. The latter is digitised, and contains one additional photograph (a group photo of officers) not present in our copy (probably never bound in). Though the texts are essentially identical, minor typographic variances confirm that copies were individually typed rather than duplicated. Our copy (unlike the NWCL copy) is specially bound in the style of Cobden Sanderson at the Rose Bindery, Boston (which was owned by the author, Hunnewell).

A rare ‘physionotrace’ portrait of Hannah Breck (1772-1846, later Mrs James Lloyd). The original charcoal and white chalk drawing from which it was engraved is preserved at the Philadelphia Academy of the Fine Arts. Hannah Breck was daughter of statesman Samuel Breck (1747-1809), and sister to Samuel Breck (1771-1862), a congressman from Pennsylvania. She married James Lloyd (1769-1831), a senator from Massachusetts, and is referred to as Anna or Hannah in various sources.�

Before the advent of photography the physionotrace was ‘the first system invented to produce multiple copies of a portrait, invented in 1786 by Gilles-Louis Chrétien (1774–1811). In his apparatus a profile cast by a lamp onto a glass plate was traced by an operator using a pointer connected, by a system of levers like a pantograph, to an engraving tool moving over a copper plate. The aquatint and roulette finished engraved intaglio plate, usually circular and small (50 mm), with details of features and costume, could be inked and printed many times’ (Photoconservation.com, sub Printing Processes).

Saint-Mémin (1770-1852) had emigrated from France in 1793 to Switzerland, where he practiced as an engraver. Crossing the Atlantic to Canada and then the United States, he established a portrait business in New York with his compatriot Thomas Bluget de Valdenuit (who initially produced the drawings for Saint-Mémin to engrave). When Valdenuit returned to Paris, Saint-Mémin adopted an itinerant practice all over the East Coast states, working variously at Philadelphia, Richmond, Charleston and Burlington. He too returned to France in 1814, having destroyed his drawing apparatus in a symbolic end to a prolific artistic enterprise which produced more than a thousand different portraits of significant figures in American society, including Washington, Revere and Jefferson. Dexter, The St. Memin Collection of Portraits (New York, 1862), 24; Miles, Saint-Mémin and the Neoclassical Profile Portrait in America (Washington, 1994), 83.

First edition of this juvenile guide to the manners, customs and costumes of peoples of the known world. The plates include: France, England, Russia, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Greece, Turkey, Persia, the East Indies, China, Japan, Barbary (North Africa), Egypt, Canaries, Africa, United States, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Argentina, Java, Australia and New Zealand.

This is one of Aubert’s Récréations instructives series for young people. The ownership inscription is of Amédée Girod de l’Ain, lawyer and politician who became Minister of Public Education and Religious Affairs in 1832. Gumuchian, 5038.

George Woodward, affectionately dubbed ‘Mustard George’ by his contemporaries, was one of the pioneers of English caricature. Like his drinking-partner Thomas Rowlandson, Woodward absorbed high and low culture omnivorously and paid keen attention to contemporary politics.

A Political Fair is ‘a fantastic survey of the international situation’ in 1807 and is considered one of Woodward’s finest images, the print catalogue of the British Museum devoting two full pages to its complex allegories. At the heart of the fair is a large booth (‘The Best-Booth in the Fair’) representing Great Britain holding aloft on its platform images of Britannia, John Bull, together with an Irishman, Scotsman and Welsh harpist gathered convivially around a punchbowl, while a waiter sweeps into the chamber below with a vast joint of roast beef on his platter. All this was typical of Woodward’s patriotism and was intended to portray the essential unity of the nation amidst the host of clamouring figures in the neighbouring booths representing the other nations. Napoleon, in tricorn and feathers, rebuffs a disgruntled Dutchman complaining about his King with the words ‘I never change Mynheer after the goods are taken out of the Shop’. High up on the right, the American booth displays a placard advertising ‘Much ado about Nothing with the Deserter’, a reference to the friction between Britain and the United States over recent defections from British to American ships and the ban on armed British ships in American ports. The Danish booth on the left advertises ‘The English Fleet and The Devil to Pay’ in reference to the hideous bombardment of Copenhagen by the British fleet in September that year.

Musical and theatrical references abound, with many of the placards punning on the titles of plays and musical performances then showing in London: Much ado about Nothing, All’s well that ends well (Shakespeare), The Padlock (Bickerstaffe), The Deserter (Dibdin), The Double Dealer (on the Russian booth, by Congreve) and The English Fleet (Dibdin again). BM Satires, 10763

First edition of a rather reactionary consideration of Paine’s republicanism which includes notice of the earlier critique by John Quincy Adams. A second edition appeared later in the same year. Hardy was a Scottish cleric, not to be confused with the radical Thomas Hardy, founder of the London Corresponding Society. Their positions cannot have been much farther apart. Sabin 59081.

First edition in French of Siris, a Chain of philosophical Reflections and Enquiries concerning the Virtues of Tar-water (1744) and of Berkeley’s two letters on the subject to Thomas Prior.

‘In 1744 appeared one of [Berkeley’s] most controversial works. Siris is a reconciliation of medicine with metaphysics, best known for its advocacy of the medicinal value of tar water, a native American preventative distilled from pine resins. Having conducted his own experiments Berkeley made specific claims for its beneficial effect in alleviating fevers, gout, scurvy, and dropsy. In trying to understand the cosmical principles that might explain this he conceived the possibility, which others took up with greater alacrity, that its properties might be those of a universal panacea, operating as condensed light. Siris had exceptional sales, primarily as a home medicine guide, for a few years and was translated into most western European languages, but its medical claims also provoked criticism’ (Oxford DNB).

Siris is, however, more than just a medical work and the consideration of tar-water led Berkeley into a lengthy chain of reflections on the principles of the universe and of divine providence. Blake p. 43; Wellcome II, p. 149; Rochedieu p. 23.