Any bookseller in Leipzig will do
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...