A Cruise on the "Dawn" Aug. 1878.

[Boston: self-published,, 1878]. A monument of enterprise in excellent taste A previously unrecorded account of a week-long cruise off the coast of New England. This delightful work recounts the adventures of five friends who chartered the yacht Dawn. A rare work, printed in a very small run, most likely as a copy for each crew member; not in WorldCat and no copies recorded at auction. The five were all well-connected Bostonians. John M. Call Jr. and Ned Tuttle were tailors and members of the Boston Yacht Club. Call commissioned what is considered one of the finest Victorian houses in Boston. Arthur Burnham was a stockbroker, and a major contributor to sending the American team to the first modern Olympics. Theodore M. Plimpton was a bookkeeper for the Downer Kerosene Co., a company to which the artist Frank S. Merrill had family connections. Merrill executed the original calligraphic manuscript and provided excellent illustrations. As a professional artist, illustrator, and engraver, he had worked on illustrated editions of Scott, Thackeray, and Twain. Louisa May Alcott considered his work on the 1880 edition of her novel Little Women "capital". This is a decidedly social account. The men go to dinners and balls, and meet frequently with other yachtsmen, both at sea and ashore. The people they meet are recorded with as much gusto as the landscape they pass. The party sailed east from Boston, stopping at Gloucester Harbor, where they laid in stores and stopped at a boatyard on Rocky Neck. The next day they went to Appledore on the Isles of Shoals, where they saw the writer and literary saloniste Celia Thaxter. They visited Boon Island, Cape Porpoise, Cape Elizabeth, and Portland Harbor, before sailing down to Harpswell Harbor, and returning to Boston. Loosely inserted is a one-page letter to Call from Levi L. Willcutt enthusiastically thanking him for the loan of this copy. Willcutt was president of the New England Felt Roofing Co., in Boston. Quarto (258 x 213 mm). 60-page lithographic facsimile manuscript, pictorial title page, 19 illustrations in the text, 8 of them hand-coloured and 5 full-page. Original brown half hard-grained morocco, purple pebble-grained boards, front cover lettered in gilt, marbled endpaper, red sprinkled edges. Extremities a little rubbed, corners and spine with neat repairs, front free endpaper somewhat brittle and now detached, rear free endpaper lacking. A very good copy. Not in Morris & Howland or Toy.