John Muir's first publication in a book, illustrated with original photographs
[Muir, John] Kneeland, Samuel. The Wonders of the Yosemite Valley, and of California. Boston and New York: Alexander Moore and Lee & Shepard, 1872
Second edition. John Muir's first contribution in a book. [iii-x], xi-xii, 12-79 pages. 10 small, mounted albumen photographs with tissue guards, two maps, three in-text illustrations. Red decorative borders on each page. Mulberry cloth, with the title decoratively stamped in gilt and black on the front board and in blind on the rear cover. All edges gilt.
A combination travelogue of a train journey from Omaha to Yosemite and a natural history of the valley, which is noteworthy for two reasons: the inclusion of ten small albumen photographs and John Muir's first appearance in a book (in chapters added to the second edition—Muir's work did not appear in the first). The albumens, including views of Half Dome, Bridal Veil Falls, and Yosemite Falls, are credited to John Soule, a Boston photographer, and he issued many of them, in slightly smaller form, as stereoviews.
$1,200
It has been long presumed that Soule was not the actual photographer. Some people have optimistically assigned the pictures to Carleton Watkins and others to Eadweard Muybridge, while more recent scholarship has attributed them to Martin Mason Hazeltine (see Kate Nearpass Ogden, "God's Great Plow and the Scripture of Nature: Art and Geology at Yosemite" in California History, Vol. 71, No. 1 (Spring 1992)). Hazeltine had a summer studio at Yosemite in the late 1860s and early 1870s and is known to have sold negatives to Soule (see the Finding Aid to the Hazeltine collection at the Oregon Historical Society).
Kneeland, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, first published The Wonders of Yosemite Valley in 1870. For the second edition, he added two chapters, "Yosemite in 1872" and "The Recent Earthquake in Yosemite." The former quotes Muir anonymously: "By far the greatest portion of Yosemite in unimprovable; her trees and her flowers will melt like the snow, but her domes and her falls are everlasting." The account of the earthquake is almost entirely Muir's work (again uncredited).
There was a third edition of the book, with more added content. Of the three editions, the second is the least common. This work is no. 10 in Francis Farquhar's chronologically arranged list of the twenty-five most important works on the region (Yosemite, the Big Trees, and the High Sierras: A Selective Bibliography). Muir's contributions are items 3 and 4 in William and Maymie Kimes' John Muir: A Reading Bibliography. Muir's two earlier publications were in newspapers. See also Lloyd W. Currey and Dennis G. Kruska's Bibliography of Yosemite, the Central and Southern High Sierra, and the Big Trees, 1839–1900 (no. 225; citing a source crediting Muybridge as a possible source for the photographs).
A very good copy, neatly rebacked, preserving most of the spine; one plate with a one-inch marginal tear (not affecting the photograph). Several plates lacking the tissue guards. Previous owner's inscription dated June 20, '72 on preliminary blank. Generally, an attractive copy. [CJI 1017]. (#E280)
$1,200
[Click on any image below for a larger view.]
Comments