Underground or Life Below the Surface. Incidents and Accidents Beyond the Light of Day; Startling Adventures in All Parts of the World; Mines and the Mode of Working Them; Under-Currents of Society; Gambling and its Horrors; Caverns and Their Mysteries; The Dark Ways of Wickedness; Prisons and Their Secrets; Down in the Depths of the Sea; Strange Stories of the Detection of Crime
Hartford, CT: J.B. Burr and Hyde, 1873. Very Good. Item #50261
Hartford, CT: J.B. Burr and Hyde, 1873. First Edition. Thick octavo; bound in contemporary quarter morocco with four raised bands; ruled and stamped in gilt; marbled edges and endpapers; 942pp. Profusely illustrated including an impressive frontispiece. Edgewear with brief exposure to boards; general rubbing and scuffing; recent archival reinforcements to front gutters, including at title page, and to rear hinge; spotting to interior, overall a Very Good and sound copy.
Includes chapters on dungeons, the Underground Railroad, the San Francisco underground, Mammoth Cave, and War and Prison adventures, among many others; an impressive production exploring late 19th-century interpretations of the literal and metaphorical subterranean. Professor Lara Langer Cohen would go on to explore many of these same worlds and their many facets in her book Going Underground: Race, Space, and the Subterranean in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Duke University Press, 2023). An intriguing work full of a variety of avenues of scholarship and amusement.
Price: $200.00