Texas. By Mrs Mary Austin Holley
Lexington, KY: J. Clarke and Co., 1836. First edition.
Duodecimo in 6s (6 13/16” x 4 3/8”, 173mm x 110mm): binder’s blank, 16(12+χ1) 214 2-346 352 (352 blank) [$2 signed (first and third leaves); –11]. 211 leaves, pp. [7] (title, title, imprint, dedication, blank, contents (inserted), blank, preface) vi-viii, 1 2-410, 2 blanks. [=x, 412] With a folding engraved map.
Bound in the blue pebbled cloth. Title gilt to the spine.
Bowed, with some bumps to the corners. Rubbed at the extremities, with wear at the fore-corners. End-papers renewed. Foxed throughout. Stub-tear to the map, with old tape residue verso.
Mary Austin Holley (1784–1846) was born in New Haven, and so is perhaps unlikely as the author of “the first book in English entirely on Texas” (Streeter). After the death of her father, she was adopted by her mother’s brother Timothy Phelps and his wife Jennett (of Janet; née Broome). The arrival of her cousin, “Father of Texas” Stephen Fuller Austin (1793–1836) as an eleven-year-old also staying with the Phelpses would change the course of her life. She married Horace Holley and moved with him to Lexington, Kentucky for his tenure president of Transylvania University (Austin was a student there, graduating in 1810). She received a land grant on Galveston Bay — the “Old Three Hundred” received land grants from Austin’s Colony — but never resided there.
The present work is sometimes called a “second edition” of her 1833 Texas. Observations, historical, geographical and descriptive…, but it is in fact a different book (the overlap being in the introduction and the map). The 1833 Texas is epistolary in form, largely recounting her 1831 visit, whereas the present work is structured more systematically, with chapters on geography, climate, natural history, native people and so forth. It also publishes --- some for the first time in book form --- crucial primary documents, including the Texas Declaration of Independence, the constitution of the Republic of Texas, the 1824 Mexican Constitution as well as Travis’s letter from the Alamo and Austin’s farewell address. It is in many ways a more important book, and --- with Hooker’s map (the second state, with his name below the title) --- more practical and persuasive to emigrants.
Graff 1935; Howes H 593; Jenkins, Basic Texas Books 94.
Item #JLR0594
Price: $14,000