The City of Philadelphia, in the State of Pennsylvania North America; as it appeared in the Year 1800 Second Edition 1804. Consisting of twenty Copper-Plates Drawn and Engraved by W. Birch Enamel Painter
THE VANISHINGLY RARE SECOND EDITION
OF BIRCH’S VIEWS OF PHILADELPHIA
Birch, William. The City of Philadelphia, in the State of Pennsylvania North America; as it appeared in the Year 1800 Second Edition 1804. Consisting of twenty Copper-Plates Drawn and Engraved by W. Birch Enamel Painter. Published by W. Birch, Springland Cot, near Neshaminy Bridge on the Bristol Road, Pennsylvania. Dec.r 31.st 1800 [i.e., 1804]. Second edition.
Oblong folio (13 7/8” x 18 9/16”, 352mm x 469mm): engraved title-page, engraved plan of Philadelphia and 20 engraved views with original hand-color. With a letterpress introduction and 2pp. subscribers’ list.
Bound in contemporary half red roan over red paste-paper boards. On the spine, six panels, with the title manuscript to a paper label in the second panel. Presented in a red morocco drop-front clam-shell box.
Some scuffs to the extremities. An unusually clean copy, with the brunt of the foxing and offsetting borne by the original tissue-guards.
William Russell Birch (1755–1834) was born and trained in England by no less than Thomas Jefferys, the jeweler and map-seller, and Sir Joshua Reynolds, founding President of the Royal Academy. He brought this expertise to the New World, settling in Philadelphia in 1794. Whereas engraved city views were long-established in Europe, no collection of them had ever been printed and published in America. Birch’s City of Philadelphia inaugurated the genre in the country, which would flourish and continue through the XXc with Currier and Ives among others. His target audience was wide; the title points to a European market, aiming to encourage emigration to the new-born nation whose Athens — its capital (until just before the publication of the work) and intellectual heart — was Philadelphia.
The views — notionally painted by Birch’s son Thomas, who would go on to be one of the great American landscape painters — were exceptionally popular, resulting in several states and four editions within Birch’s lifetime, this being the second. Subscribers included Thomas Jefferson as president (it is written that he displayed the volume at the entrance to the executive office), Gilbert Stuart and Robert Fulton. As fitting the transition-point in paper-production, Birch used fine laid — importing, in some instances, Whatman paper from England at doubtless staggering cost — and wove (i.e., made on a continuous mesh rather than on a wired frame) paper. Birch initially announced that the second edition would be available only colored; when it finally came to press, however, he reverted to the model of the first edition, viz. that colored copies would be roughly half again more expensive than uncolored copies.
The first edition (1800) contained the title (here altered only with the addition of “Second Edition 1804,” the imprint proper remaining unchanged), plan and twenty-eight plates. Its scope made it very expensive indeed. The second edition was correspondingly reduced in number as well as size; the plates themselves were about the same, but the paper was reduced by about an inch in each dimension. Birch included thirteen plates in second (or third) state from the initial edition, plus 7 new plates, of which 6 were revised from first-edition plates; the “Schuylkill Bridge High Street” is de novo, as it had been newly built (though not finished) in the intervening years.
The first edition of the views receives Howes’s highest designation of rarity: “dd:” “superlatively rare books, almost unobtainable.” The second edition does not appear in Howes, and only one institutional copy — Winterthur (colored) — is recorded on OCLC. Only three copies are recorded at auction: the Earl of Leven copy (uncolored; Sotheby’s London 1949), the Tonner-Snyder-Snider-Reese copy (uncolored; Bloomsbury New York 2008 and Christie’s New York 2022) and the present copy.
The present volume was purchased at the Sotheby’s New York sale of Robert Lincoln McNeil Jr. (1916–2010; 5 December 2013, lot 4). McNeil was a pharmaceutical executive best known for developing and selling Tylenol. He was raised in the Germantown section of Philadelphia, and became a life-long philanthropist in the region, a collector as well as a patron of the arts — a legacy that persists in the Barra Foundation, of which he was founder.
First edition: Deák 228; Howes B 459 (dd); Sabin 5530; Stauffer 159–188.
Item #JLR0379
Price: $125,000