Gorham, Handful of Silver, 1902 First Edition

A Handful of Silver, Six Stories of Silversmiths by Horace Townsend
Inscribed and Signed to Arthur Brentano Sr. (1858–1944), President of the Brentano's, at the time, the largest bookselling firm in the world.
Published by The Gorham Co. New York, 1902.
Parchment paper on boards, 6 tipped-in color plates by Alex M. McLellan, with printed tissue guards decorated gold. Bound in a japon-vellum binding with gilt rules, lettering and design stamped on front coverin original slipcase, printed on handmade watermarked paper by the Orr Press, Bartlett & Company for Gorham. Decorated endpapers.
Handsome book produced by Gorham during the height of their popularity. That significant boost came forty-plus years earlier when Mary Todd Lincoln bought their Josephine silverware pattern for the White House.
Townsend was a journalist (New York Herald Tribune), playwright and novelist who had esteem as an specialist in 18th and 17th c. decorative arts. (He also edited Some Letters of R. L. Stevenson.) The stories in the book are set in Alexandria, Mount Ida, Nuremberg, Rome, Mexico, and Lake George, the latter involving Lieutenant Paul Revere engraving on shoe buckles for Mlle. Celine Paret. Townsend died unexpectedly in 1922 when he succumbed to gas poisoning due to an open lighting jet in his New York apartment.

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