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Notes of a Book-Lover by Brander Matthews
Grolier Club Publications part 2
No better choice could the Grolier Club have made than the work selected as its third publication. This is Washington Irving's" History of New York, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrich Knickerbocker." Here was a most happy solution of the claims of locality and the claims of literature.
Most fitly could the Grolier Club bend its energies to the preparation and production of a rich and worthy edition of a book about New York by the greatest of New York authors. By good fortune the humorous chronicle of the learned and gentle Dutch antiquary lends itself easily to abundant illustration and decoration; and of the opportunities offered by the late Diedrich Knickerbocker the present Grolier Club has been swift to avail itself. No better piece of book-making has ever been sent forth by an American publisher. It seems to me that this cheerful issue of "Knickerbocker's 'History of New York'" is worthy to stand beside M. Conquet's noble editions of Stendhal's two great novels, "Le Rouge et le Noir" and "La Chartreuse de Parme" - the models of modern book-making, and altogether the best that French taste and French skill can accomplish in this difficult art. I do not say that the American volumes are quite equal to the French; they lack, for one thing, the tender and brilliant etchings which serve as headpieces for every chapter of Stendhal's stories; and again, they are without the final refinement of the recurring title water-marked in the lower margins of the page. Perhaps the American books have not all the soft richness and easy grace of M. Conquet's masterpieces, but yet they brave the comparison boldly.
From cover to core there is a delightfully Dutch flavor in these two comely tomes. The boards in which they are bound are clad in orange, as befits the garb of the only true account of the decline and fall of Dutch rule in America. The paper within is Dutch; and Dutch, too, are the types, facsimile of those used by Elzevir at Leyden in 1659 - only five years before New Amsterdam experienced a change of heart and became New York, after Colonel Nichols, taking Peter Stuyvesant by surprise, had captured the city. The frontispieces to the two volumes are etchings from drawings of "The Battery in 1670," and" The Governor's Representative," by Mr. George H. Boughton, who was once a school boy in the Aurania of the Dutch. The other two etchings are views of "Fort New Amsterdam, 1651," and of "New Amsterdam in 1656," this last being a reproduction of the earliest known print of New York. The half-titles, head-bands, tail-pieces and initial letters are some of them from Dutch models, and all of them are most pleasantly Dutch in spirit; two of them were designed by Mr. Howard Pyle, and the rest were drawn by Mr. Will H. Drake. It remains only to note that the original manuscript of Irving's careful and elaborate revision of "Knickerbocker's 'History of New York'" is now owned by a member of the Grolier Club, and that advantage was taken of this to indicate in an appendix the minor and yet always interesting changes and suppressions of the author.