A Handful of Silver by Horace Townsend

1902.

146 pp. Hard bound in vellum. Gilt top edge.

Some interior age spots.

Includes a book plate and an affixed get well card inside.

See photographs as they form an integral part of the description.

This was distributed to a small number of friends and customers of Gorham. It contains 6 stories written by Horace Townsend, President of Gorham, all of which are related to silver, with 6 color plates illustrating them. The color plates, by Alex M. McLellan, all have tissue guards.

A handsome little production produced by Gorham during the height of their popularity. That significant boost came forty-plus years earlier when Mary Todd Lincoln bought their "Josephine" silverware pattern for the White House. Townsend was a journalist (New York Herald Tribune), playwright and novelist who had esteem as an specialist in 18th and 17th C. decorative arts. (He also edited "Some Letters of R. L. Stevenson.") The stories in the book at hand are set in Alexandria, Mount Ida, Nuremburg, Rome, Mexico and Lake George, the latter involving Lieutenant Paul Revere's engraving on shoe buckles for Mlle. Celine Paret.

Townsend died unexpectedly (1922) when he succumbed to gas poisoning due to an open lighting jet in his New York apartment. A charming book.