For those of you that keep up with my 2005 supplement, here's the latest installment. A pot-pourri of wonderful images and information about American magazines that I obtained between 1995 and 2005.
A great way of showcasing the variety and depth of what I collect, annotated with bibiographic references.
The most valuable is clearly the complete run of Pennsylvania Magazine, including all the engravings. Today, this would be an impossible task and would approach six figures to obtain.
A great collecting story is how I obtained the complete April 1776 issue, notable for two very important contents: the appearance of former slave Phillis Wheatley's "Ode to George Washington" (the first literary work published by an African-American) and the first American Map of Virginia. Both of these today would approach 5 figures in value.
The magazine without the map was obtained from issues obtained by The Print Shop on Lexington Avenue in NYC. They had a complete copy but obtained the issue for the map. Hence, they had little or no appreciation of the value of the contents, so I was able to buy it for a small fraction of its value.
Just a few months later, the map was obtained from Mark Mitchell ( I believe for under $2000), a prominent dealer in African-Americana. He understood completely the value of the Wheatley contribution but had very little appreciation of the true value of the map and was quite willing to part with it!
By the way, here's the other scarce and highly valuable map from the June 1776 issue (the extreme importance of the contents of this issue having been discussued in a prior post)
So that's how to do it. You can obtain great material even from very knowlegeable dealers when they are selling material out of their area of expertise.
So, as they say in Latin: Scientia potestas est or, alternatively Scientia ops est
and in Greek: Η γνώση είναι δύναμη.
KNOWLEDGE IS POWER!
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