How to Cultivate and Preserve Celery.

Albany: Theophilus Roessle, 1860.

Octavo (23.5 x 15.5 cm.), [6], xxvi, [27]-100 pages. Illustrated with color lithograph frontispiece and three plates, two of which are also in color. FIRST EDITION. A handsomely produced treatise devoted entirely to celery, the only title published under the series "Roessle's Gardener's Hand-Books". The author, the son of a market gardener, emigrated to the United States from Stuttgardt in 1825 at the age of 14, his first job in this country as snow shoveler and firewood splitter before making his own way to market gardening and, finally, real estate. Roessle was quite a wealthy man by 1860 and this appears to have been a vanity project of his, expensively produced and self-published (a biography of the author can be found in George Roger Howell's Bi-Centennial History of Albany (1886), pages 653-4.). Publisher's brown blind-embossed cloth, gilt spine. Spine rather sunned and gilt almost entirely effaced, contemporary ownership signature in pencil on front free endpaper with her unobtrusive marginalia and notes in rear, preliminaries a bit foxed, else Very Good and sound. [Hedrick; Woodburn, page 546].

Price: $200.00