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Trillium Antiquarian Books Some common memento is better,
Something he prized and is known by;
His old clothes-- a few books perhaps.
William Carlos Williams, Tract
Welcome to the home of Trillium Antiquarian Books where you can search or browse our collections of antiquarian books on Country Life and Natural History -- scarce books, from A to Z, on angling, animals, apiculture, bees, birds, botany, Darwin, farming, fish, flora, fruit growing, gardens, geography, grapes, herbals, horticulture, landscapes, mammals, orchards, ornithology, seeds, vegetables, wildflowers, zoology... and likely several other matters which do not come readily to mind.
Search and browse, too, our antiquarian Canadiana and Literature collections. In our Canadiana collection you will find the early works of Moodie, Traill, Davies, Bouchette, and others from Upper and Lower Canada. Our antiquarian Literature collection makes room among its novels, sermons, and poetry for some rare works by Mark Twain and Stephen Crane.
Sometimes all that's left of an old book is the pictures. You will find antiquarian prints and maps, together with entire illustrated books, in Trillium's collection of Images from antiquarian sources.
If you spend any time hunting up books, you are bound to come upon an occasional book so odd or idiosyncratic as to be irresistible. Proof of the proposition is to be found in the Trillium collection of intriguing Curiosities. Since their comings and goings are unpredictable, it's usually worth stopping in for a short browse.
Trillium Antiquarian Books has been selling scarce, out-of-print books on the Internet since 1998 and, earlier, by traditional mail order. Look for us at book fairs in Ontario and the American northeast, where we have exhibited during the past ten years or so. We are always interested in buying antiquarian books in our areas of interest, whether single volumes or complete collections.
Trillium Antiquarian Books is owned by William Van Nest, Peterborough, Ontario, Canada. Trillium Grandiflorum, from which we take our name, is the provincial flower of Ontario and appears in snowy white drifts among the hardwoods each Spring. One of several trilliums resident in the back garden furnished the images on this page. |
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Remarks & Notices
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Underwood & Underwood
and
Underwood & Underwood
Accounts of the Scientific Method begin with something called Observation. You are encouraged to imagine earnest scientists peering through various instruments, gathering vapours from heated liquids in what looks to be the lab of a well-financed moonshiner, or filling a floor-to-ceiling chalkboard with strings of equations indistinguishable from the glyphs of the Mayan calendar. But a great deal of the observation part of research, its beginnings, is not nearly as organized and purposeful as these images suggest. Most of the time, ‘observation’ is simply the work of a curious mind attracted to coincidence or apparent accident, a kind of snooping. You notice maple sap flows during late Winter when the nights are cold and the days warm. You mistake a cup of vinegar for water, add it to the baking soda in the pancake mix, and find you have inadvertently created a science project for your nine-year-old.
When booksellers speak of their research, it is to this aspect of the Scientific Method that they refer, the snooping part. Take the case of Underwood & Underwood and Underwood & Underwood.
Not long ago I acquired an attractive book on landscape architecture, published just after the turn of the twentieth century, with text and photographs by the landscape architect Loring Underwood. It is entitled The Garden and Its Accessories and inscribed, “To Charles Francis Adams 2nd from Loring Underwood”. To the history snoop any New Englander named Adams, and ‘Charles Francis 2nd’ at that, invites inquiry. This one descended directly from the two American presidents, John and John Quincy, and was brother to the American writer Henry Adams. Charles Francis himself was for a time president of the Union Pacific Railroad.
And who was the author Loring Underwood? Reading in Lyons, Gentlemen Photographers (1987), I found not only the landscape architect Loring Underwood but also a second Underwood, Loring’s brother William (or, Wm. Lyman as he was known). For years Wm. Lyman was a volunteer researcher at MIT where he developed photomicrophic techniques for capturing images of bacteria, among other things, at magnifications up to 1000.
Why should anyone want to take pictures of bacteria? Well, if your family’s business was processing and selling canned food, you would be interested. An earlier Underwood had made a success of the American civil war by supplying the Union army with canned food. But some cans, contaminated with bacteria, had a disconcerting way of swelling up and exploding... marginally acceptable among soldiers, perhaps, but not in civilian kitchens. Wm. Lyman set himself to solve the exploding can problem and save the family food business. (You can see for yourself if he succeeded. I think the stores still sell Underwood & Underwood’s Deviled Ham.)
Remember what I said about coincidence? Well, now we have to go to Kansas. While the New England Underwoods were taking pictures of their wealthy friends’ houses and gardens or studying to make their canned ham safe to eat, out in Kansas, Elmer and Bert Underwood, two brothers from Ottawa, Kansas, started going door-to-door selling stereo-views of the world’s far off places. They would also sell you the special stereo-viewer which let you see the Eiffel Tower in three dimensions. It almost looked real. The boys (You just know they were thought of that way by some) must have knocked on the right doors, for Underwood & Underwood became the largest publisher of stereo views in the world, producing 10 million stereo views and selling 300,000 viewers in 1900 alone. Later, Underwood & Underwood became a world-wide photo news service. It’s Horatio Alger all over, isn’t it?
So, now you see how snooping leads you. The where isn’t vital. You needn’t arrive at a conclusion or concoct a theory. You’re along for the ride, for the snoop. This time, though, I got off when someone mentioned Underwood typewriters.
William Van Nest
March 2010
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