Product Details

DEPPING, G[eorges]-B[ernard]. Depping’s Evening Entertainments; Comprising Delineations of the Manners and Customs of Various Nations. A New Edition, Enlarged and Improved, with Twenty Engravings on Wood by Atherton. Philadelphia: Alexander Towar, No. 19 St. James Street; Hogan & Thompson, 139½ Market Street, 1833. New Edition, Enlarged and Improved. 8vo. 260 pp. Illustrated with twenty wood engravings by Atherton, including title-page vignette. An early American work of popular geography, ethnography, natural history, and cultural instruction, presenting the manners, customs, occupations, industries, and everyday life of peoples throughout the world in a series of entertaining instructional “evenings.” Among the subjects treated are the Indigenous peoples of North America and the fur trade; Norway and its industries; salmon fishing and aquatic birds; Holland and its dykes and canals; German mechanical ingenuity; Switzerland and emigration; Italy, Venice, and Florence; the Venetian Carnival; and English commerce and industry. Particularly interesting as an example of early nineteenth-century American juvenile and educational publishing, combining geography, history, natural history, technology, and descriptions of foreign cultures for a young general readership. The work provides an evocative contemporary view of how distant peoples and places were presented to American readers during the early decades of the nineteenth century. The title page is ornamented with an attractive wood-engraved vignette and states that the volume contains twenty engravings on wood by Atherton. Condition: Scattered foxing and age-toning, including moderate foxing to the title page, as expected for an American book of this period; otherwise to be described according to binding and completeness. A pleasing early American illustrated educational work, with particular interest for collectors of Americana, early juvenile literature, geography and travel, ethnography, natural history, and nineteenth-century wood engraving.