[Rarebooks] fa: JAPAN: An Account Geographical & Historical 1852 - INSCRIBED TO COMMODORE PERRY'S SECY. OF THE NAVY

[ArCh]

Listed now, auction ending Sunday, November 17. Images and more details can be found at the URL below or by searching for the seller name arch_in_la. 

http://tinyurl.com/w5lhoul

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
Ann Arbor, MI, USA

Charles MacFarlane: Japan; An Account, Geographical and Historical, from the Earliest Period at which the Islands Composing the Empire were Known to Europeans, Down to the Present Time; and the Expedition Fitted Out in the United States, etc. London: George Routledge & Co., 1852. First edition; 8vo (23 cm) in original publisher's forest green cloth decorated in blind and gilt; xviii, [2], 435 pp.; with a frontispiece and 27 in-text illustrations (after Arthur Allom), folding map.

PRESENTATION COPY with an interesting association. Published in the year which saw Commodore Matthew Perry set off on his mission to "open Japan," the book is presented to Perry's boss by the dedicatee: "To the Hon. John P. Kennedy,—U.S. Secretary of the Navy,— With Mr. Bertie's respectful Compliments." John Pendleton Kennedy (1795-1870) served as Millard Fillmore's Secretary of the Navy from 1852-3, during which time he oversaw Perry's mission to Japan as well as the expedition to the Valley of the Amazon undertaken by William Herndon and Lardner Gibbon. An ardent abolitionist and believer in the Union, Kennedy was considered as a possible running mate for Abraham Lincoln in the presidential race of 1860. Brownlow C. Bertie, to whom the book is dedicated, was the fourth son of the 5th Earl of Abingdon, an officer in the Life Guards, and apparently something of an expert on Japan. Sadly, he died the same year this book was inscribed, at the age of thirty-three.

Binding with fairly modest rubbing and bumping to the extremities; folding map with a closed tear to the margin and another small tear at the fold; one page-gathering working loose but still held by the binding, contents evenly toned throughout, else clean and sound, firmly bound.