New York. The Century Co., 1917, First Printing.
Hardcover, Burgundy cloth with gilt lettering on front and spine, large octavo (23 cm.); gilt top edges., xv, 681 pages; Frontispiece, plates, facsimiles.
This former Library of Congress copy was bequeathed to the LOC by Albert Adsit Clemons.

The book is an account of Street’s adventures and impressions gained in his travels through the American South. What makes this copy of particular interest is its association and provenance: The presentation inscription on the front endpaper is as follows:
Elizabeth White Clemons
from Isabel and Harrison Paul(?)
Christmas 1917

Elizabeth Clemons was the wife of Albert Adsit Clemons of Halcyon House fame. She was the daughter of Mary Anne and Nathaniel Gilman White, of Lawrence, Mass.  Her father was president of the Boston and Maine R.R. Albert and Elizabeth were married in Washington, DC in December 1912 and they both lived there but at some point they stopped living together, and they maintained separate residences in Washington. There has been speculation that their marriage may have been a marriage of convenience. Albert died in 1938 and and in his will, Albert Clemons left his wife "grateful love and affection". Elizabeth died in 1949.

In his will, Albert Clemons bequeathed the Halcyon House library, including this book, to the Library Of Congress and the LOC label on the front pastedown states : “Bequest of Albert Adsit Clemons” The LOC stamp is on the front endpaper and other locations in the book.

Albert Clemons purchased Halcyon House, (now on the National Register of Historic Places) in 1900 and lived there until his death in 1938.

By some accounts Clemons spent a portion of his life working as an employee for the U.S. Department of the Treasury, but he is also said to have been independently wealthy and used his money to purchase major historic properties in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., including the landmark Halcyon House in 1900 and Quality Hill in 1915. He converted parts of his properties into convoluted apartment spaces and generated income by renting out flats to tenants.

Clemons spent the latter half of his life using his wealth to obsessively remodel Halcyon House alongside a live-in carpenter. He added dozens of rooms, secret passages, and stairs leading to nowhere, driven by a superstitious belief that he would not die as long as he kept building. He carried out extensive works, some useful and some not - several rooms were so small that not even a chair fitted, and many passageways and staircases led to nowhere! Most notably, he remodeled the front of the house as seen today.

Artifacts recovered at the site in a recent  archeological dig suggest that Clemons may have hosted (and been part of ) an underground drag scene at Halcyon House during Prohibition.

Julian Leonard Street (April 12, 1879–February 19, 1947) was an American author, born in Chicago. He was a reporter on the New York Mail and Express (later Evening Mail) in 1899 and had charge of its dramatic department in 1900–01. [An incomplete list of his] writings includes the following:
Abroad at Home (1914): A book of "American impressions" written after Street travelled "some five thousand miles and visited twenty cities" within his country.
American Adventures: A Second Trip "Abroad at Home". (1917)
Mysterious Japan (1922)
Tides (1926). He made contributions to magazines. Street twice won an O. Henry Award. His short story "Mr. Bisbee's Princess," published in Redbook and anthologized in Great American Short Stories: O. Henry Memorial Prize Winning Stories 1919–1934, won the award in 1925. The story was adapted as the 1926 W. C. Fields silent film So's Your Old Man. In 1915 Street published a book on Theodore Roosevelt, called The Most Interesting American. He is credited with being the art critic who wrote that the painting exhibited at the 1913 Armory Show by Marcel Duchamp called Nude Descending a Staircase, resembled "an explosion in a shingle factory."

Street gained a measure of notoriety following a 1914 article in Collier's Weekly describing the red-light district along Myers Avenue in Cripple Creek. The Cripple Creek city fathers, unamused, responded by renaming Myers Avenue to Julian Street. Street moved to Princeton in the 1920s. The university houses his manuscript collection and a library is named after him there.

CONDITION: Good+. (Discolored spot at lower spine, Some wear at spine ends and corners. Repaired tears of paper at gutter of front pastedown. Small Library of Congress label and stamp on front pastedown and endpaper. Presentation inscription on front endpaper. The tightly bound Contents are complete, intact and clean except for LOC markings on title, copyright and dedication pages.)