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A Circular, Regarding the Second Naturalized American to Be Sent to the Soviet Union to Face a Pending Death Sentence

Linnas, Anu, Tiina, and Epp Printed document; 14 x 8 1/2; single sheet, text to recto only; old crease line through the middle, else minor wear; in very good or better condition.Karl Linnas (1919 - 1987) was an Estonian-American, tried in absentia by the Soviet Government and sentenced to death in 1962 for allegedly serving as commandant of a Nazi concentration camp in Tartu in the early 1940s and for personally executing civilians, including small children. In the meantime, after WWII, he had spent time in Displaced Persons camps in Germany and had immigrated to the US in 1951, becoming a citizen in 1960. In 1979 he was charged by US immigration officials with providing false statements, in order to enter the US. In 1981, he was stripped of his US citizenship for having lied about his ties to the Nazis. In 1986, a federal appeals court upheld his deportation order and in April of that year, he was imprisoned, while awaiting the result of his final appeal. In 1987, he was flown to the Soviet Union, where he would die in a prison hospital in ST. Petersburg three months later. The current circular was created by his three daughters in August of 1986, while he was in prison awating deportation. It described a conspiracy between the Justice Department and the KGB to fabricate evidence and implored people to write to their senators in Karl's support and to contribute to their father's defense fund.
  • $250
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A Scrapbook of Postal Telegraph – Cable Company Material

Fields, Bryant W. A scrapbook of photographs, drawings, newspaper clippings, letters, telegrams, company documents, etc., 1890s - 1940s; 11 1/2 x 10 1/2; pp. [74], mostly recto only; sheets housed in a contemporary, tri-ring binder; many of the photographs subtitled in manuscript; some of the sheets with small cuts at perforations; occasional spotting and edge-wear; overall in very good condition.Assembled by a long-term employee and later, executive officer, in Kansas City, Missouri and San Francisco, of the Postal Telegraph - Cable Company, the scrapbook contained an interesting glimpse into the history of the only viable competitor to Western Union in the United States at the end of the 19th century. The company was founded in the 1880s by Irish-American industrialist John William Mackay (1831 - 1902), who had amassed a vast fortune in silver mining in the Comstock Lode. Bryant Fields, the compiler of the current scrapbook, had begun working for the Mackay venture in its early years at the age of just 14 (there is a studio photograph of him at the start of his employment). Some of the assembled images included storefronts of the Postal Telegraph Company aross several states, a 1926 hole-digger and pole-setter machinery and operators across the desolate Arizona desert on the Los Angeles - Texas line, a submarine cable repair outfit, employees inside the Salt Lake City station, and many more. There were also personal photographs of trips of the Fields Family. Other items included several manuscript- and typed company lists of authorized positions and salaries, telegrams, clipped newspaper articles and cartoons, and so on.
  • $1,250
  • $1,250
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A Small Group of Quackery Items, Related to Dr. W. O. Coffee Absorption Treatment

Coffee, Dr. W. O. Four items - a letter, a pamphlet, and two personalized envelopes (one unused); letter - single sheet of the doctor's stationary, typed to recto only, old fold lines; pamphlet - 5 3/4 x 3 1/2, pp. [4], illustrated with a drawing, small chip to upper corner, else very minor wear; overall in very good condition.Even among the miriad of frauds and quacks in the late 19th- and early 20th - centuries, Dr. Coffee held a special place of his own. Setting up shop in Des Moines, he operated his "Eye and Ear Infirmary" from the 1890s until 1927, without a medical license, and for that matter, without any compunction, as it would eventually be revealed that he employed women without any medical training to diagnose ailments and furnish treatments. He also enjoyed a brisk mail-order business, bombarding unsuspecting citizens with letters, touting his magical potions, treatments, and cures, then mailing the said cures once the addressee responded. He also wrote a book on his Absorption Treatment for eyes, which would receive a well-researched and thoroughly-scathing review by author and investigative journalist Samuel Hopkins Adams. Adams would discover that Dr. Coffee had used German Professor Haab's legitimate work "External Diseases of the Eye" to plagiarize illustrations and use them in his own book, but assign completely different diagnoses based on the images.One of the above-mentioned letters was the current one, apparently not the first one sent to one Mr. J. W. Macy, in which Dr. Coffee urged him to fill in a symptom questionare, through wich the doctor would diagnose his eyes remotely and offer treatment, if and when he developed eye problems. The pamphlet,with the bombastic title: "I Was Blind, but Can Now See. Restored to Sight by the Wonderful Absorption Treatment of.Dr. W. O. Coffee," featured the testament of one Miss Mae Jenkins and a letter to the public by the doctor himself.
  • $350
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Krasnaia shapochka (Little Red Riding Hood) [A Movable Book]

Anonymous First edition, n. d. (1920s); 9 x 7; pp. [10]; card stock wraps, with a chromolothograph to the front wrap, incorporating two illustrations from the story, a frame within a frame; illustrated with black-and-white lithographed drawings and four full-page chromolithographed plates with pull-tab, movable parts; small rust spots around staples; a bit of wear to edges and corners; in very good condition.According to a lengthy research by Walter Iwaskiw and Barbara Dash of the Library of Congress on this beautiful and rare edition of the classic fairy tale (as per OCLC - the only copy at an institution) - ".sometimes the circumstances surrounding the publication of a single book can lead one into an unfamiliar realm of publishing and cultural history." The first question asked was why would Orenshtein, an Ukrainian-Jewish publisher, release a book in Russian, in the town of Kolomyia, or even in Kyiv, which were under Austrian rule from 1772 until 1918. Even more puzzling, for the fact that his publishing firm, founded in 1903, was known for its high-quality, affordable Ukrainian-language books. The answer to this might have been that after Galicia was occupied by Russia, then recovered by Austria, and then reoccupied by Russia between 1914 and 1918, all Ukrainian cultural institutions were shut down and efforts were made to introduce Russian into the educational system. Or, the book was intended as a special item to be marketed among Russophiles in the area. At some point during that time, Orenshtein was arrested and exiled to Russia, ceasing publishing altogether. After the end of WWI, he reemerged in Kyiv, where he opened a bookstore. He also founded a publishing house with branches in Leipzig and Berlin and between 1919 and 1932 he would publish many literary works, dictionaries, and approximately 40 children's books. Ultimately, Orenshtein would perish in the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw during WWII. The second question was who was the artist and who supplied the movable paper technology for a very-modestly-produced publication. It turned out that Sully and Kleinteich in New York had published, around the same time, an English-language edition of "Red Riding Hood" with the same four movable chromolithographs (possibly) by Ethel Dewees. Did Orenshtein obtain the plates during a trip to the US he took in 1921? Or, as was the tradition of that period to have the major publishers of American and British children's illustrated books get their color printing done in Germany, perhaps Orenshtein had acquired the plates from the same European source? (W.R. Iwaskiw and B.L. Dash, "The mystery of Yakiv Orenshtain's Little Red Riding Hood" in Slavic & East European Information Resources, vol. 11, nos. 2-3 (Apr.-Sept. 2010), p. 120-135).
  • $1,250
  • $1,250
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500 Successful Money-making Formulas and Trade Secrets. With Full Directions for Manufacturing Most of the Best Selling Articles Ever Placed on the Market – Comprising a Rare and Valuable Collection of Well Tried Recipes, Trade Wrinkles and Manufacturing Secrets by Many of Which Large Fortunes Have Been Made. Published for the Trade

Anonymous (Curtiss, C. E.) First edition presumed, n. d. (1890s); 5 3/4 x 4 1/4; pp. [1], 4-57, [4]; brown wraps, printed in dark-blue and decorated with an elaborate border; foxing mostly to front wrap; paper a bit brittle, with a small chip to upper corner of back wrap; in good to very good condition.Uncommon, with at least two print variants known, the booklet was extremely-cheaply made and issued by an elusive enterpreneur, who would call himself in contemporary media advertisements "Mr. Mail Order Man!" (this copy with no indication of author/publisher; the variant copy with author/publisher identified in ads to front wrap verso). Unlike the giants of the 19th-century mail-order business Sears, Montgomery Ward, etc., Mr. Curtiss capitalized on the idea of inspiring people to start small, home-based, mail-order businesses with handmade goods. To that effect, he supplied the recipes and instructions for manufacturing hundreds of products, including makeup and beauty potions (Oriental Skin Beautifier, Perfume Tablets, Violet Tooth Powder), beverages (Lemon Beer, Sham Champagne), veterinary remedies, quack medicines, household cleaners, inks and dyes, and candy, as well as more bizarre ones, such as Fire Works, To Catch Foxes, and Artificial Honey. He appeared to had published several other books on magic tricks, on how to cure bashfullness, etc.
  • $350