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Superlatively Rare Antebellum Atlas with Original Color - The Pioneering Work of the Father of the A

Currency:USD Category:Collectibles Start Price:1,900.00 USD Estimated At:3,800.00 - 5,000.00 USD
Superlatively Rare Antebellum Atlas with Original Color - The Pioneering Work of the Father of the A
Significant milestone in both cartography and American economic development, The Popular American Atlas or General Guide to Geography, Chronology, Commerce & Statisticks, New-York: Freeman Hunt & Co., 1835 - predating his nation-changing Hunt's Merchants' Magazine by four years. 10 1/4 x 12 3/4, original ink-blue marbled boards, calf spine and tips, contrasting sapphire marbled endpapers, unpaginated but 3/4" thick. (18) pp. text section, plus complete suite of 56 plates of full-page, crisply engraved, blind-paneled maps of the states and the world, each with lovely original hand watercolor, variously in pale green, raspberry, and golden yellow. An elaborate, ahead-of-its-time compendium, exhibiting innovative and fascinating charting and graphic styles to show comparative sizes, extents, and relationships (depicting how, for example, Naples' population was then almost twice New York's, and Boston's dwarfed by Palermo, Sicily). American maps include U.S., Maine, N.H. and Vermont, Mass., R.I. and Conn., N.Y., N.J. and Penna., Dela., Maryland and Va., District of Columbia, Carolinas and Georgia, Florida, Miss. and Ala., La. and Ark., Tenn. and Ky., Mo. and Ill., Ohio and Ind., and Mich. and Great Lakes. Some showing canals and railroads, finished, chartered, and proposed. Together with British America, "Mexico, Guatemala and West Indies" (including "Coahuila & Texas" as one expanse), Central and South America, various maps of Europe, Africa, and Asia, "Caucasian Countries and Turkey in Asia," Persia and Arabia, China and Japan, "Farther India or Chin India...," "Oceanica and Oceania," and the Pacific.

Freeman Hunt is credited with pioneering, if not transforming, the United States into a market society, through economic journalism. By transforming population statistics into market statistics - as included in this atlas - his work "not only reflected the dramatic economic changes which were taking place in American society...but rather played a crucial role in bringing them about by shifting America's wealthiest businessmens' attention away from foreign lands and towards the vast potential profits which could be reaped from the energies of the American people and the resources of American land."--Draft monograph on Hunt, by Eli Cook, Harvard; complete copy accompanies. In 1836, "suddenly self-conscious of his statistical ramblings, Hunt made a point to explain to his editor the reasoning behind his writing style: 'I consider the general diffusion of the statistical, commercial and geographical knowledge of interesting portions of our widespread republic, of vast importance to enterprising Yankees.' Hunt had discovered his life's calling: To assist American merchants and financiers by serving them a healthy dose of facts, figures and charts...to supply American businessmen with all the information they needed to capture new markets, make smarter capital investments, take advantage of novel financial instruments such as manufacturing or railroad securities, follow their real-estate holdings and, in short, maximize their profits. For the next two decades, Hunt's became the magazine that no serious financier, merchant or manufacturer could afford not to read. And at the heart of this periodical lay not colorful anecdotes or moralistic catechisms, but statistical reports. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, most Americans not living on slave plantations did not depend on commodities for their sustenance and had only limited encounters with markets. Most of the materials they ate, wore or used as shelter had not been procured through a market exchange. By the time of the Civil War, this was no longer the case. Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, a process that had begun in the early nineteenth century began to expand tremendously and the U.S. was transformed from a society with markets, to a market society, in which nearly all aspects of Americans' everyday life had become embedded in the mechanisms of private, profit-seeking, market exchange...."

Lacking upper 2" of spine covering, and all but "...Atlas" of leather cover label, spine covering loose but remountable, two older strips of brown tape, inner hinge weak but holding; likely lacking front marbled endleaf; frontispiece and title page each lacking fragment approximately 2 1/2 x 2 1/2 at upper right, the latter with repairable tear in Baltimore miniature map and loss of about a third of Philadelphia (the title page's other 10 miniature city plans unaffected); considerable foxing of text section on groundwood paper, but the entirety of the map plates with some very light toning, else surprisingly fresh and clean, colors true, and very fine and better, owing to their superior paper. Abebooks locates no examples. WorldCat states two copies (Portland, Maine Public Library and Western Reserve), however their respective catalogues do not include this title. Perhaps the only survivor in private hands.
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