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Showing posts with the label Alfred Lorentz

Alfred Lorentz, bookseller of Leipzig

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Last month, I wrote about a lawyer and publisher in California, in 1898, sending a letter to Leipzig, Germany in an attempt to find a bookseller in Europe for his new book (see Any bookseller in Leipzig will do ). He addressed it to Any Bookseller in Leipzig and hoped for the best. Notation on the envelope indicated he got lucky. Alfred Lorentz apparently was the bookseller who received the letter. I thought a nice companion piece to that cover would be some ephemera from Lorentz's business. I got lucky and found something less than a month later. This looks like a "home-made" postcard or ad card from 1923 (postmark date). The paper is thinner than card stock and the piece is cut a bit uneven. Still it got the job done for business communications. A rough translation of the message on the backside of the card indicates that Lorentz was selling everything from novelties to classic works of literature and the arts and sciences. He invites customers to come by and examine h...

Any bookseller in Leipzig will do

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Maybe. Maybe not. And why Leipzig? More than a hundred years ago, 1898 to be exact, California publisher Gilbert Wyman, of Fruit Vale (Fruitvale) in Alameda County, sent a letter addressed simply To Any Bookseller in Leipsic (sic) Germany. The cover, with 1898 postmark, is shown below. I can find only one book published by G. Wyman: Public Land and Mining Laws of Alaska, The Northwest Territory, and the Province of British Columbia , compiled by Wyman, and it was published in 1898, the year this letter went out in search of any bookseller who might be interested in stocking a few copies of, presumably, this book. Wyman was an attorney, according to an 1897 copy of California Attorneys Directory . Perhaps as a publisher, Wyman was a "one hit wonder" with regards to actually getting a book into print. And "hit" may be stretching it quite a bit with this title. I would assume Wyman had a limited market for this book on mining laws in the northwest region of the North A...