The complete
1903 book catalogue
of Frederick J. Drake & Company of Chicago is now available
on-line. This catalogue appears in the back of one of their books
that bears a copyright date of 1903 and some of the books listed in it
are described as New or Latest editions for 1903 through 1905, so I
presume it dates from around then.
Just reading the descriptions of the books immerses you in a world
long gone and largely forgotten, when humour trod on topics
forbidden today, home handymen consulted 560 page two-volume works on
the use of the steel square, and the infatuated would turn to
North's Book of Love Letters for help in winning the
heart of their dearly beloved. Teddy Roosevelt was president of the
45 United States, the Wright brothers were fiddling around with a
curious contraption on a sand dune in North Carolina, and the dollar
was as good as gold: 50 cents would buy you a hardbound book of 200
pages, shipped postpaid to almost anywhere in the civilised world,
which wasn't ashamed to so describe itself.
The pages are presented as JPEG images, scanned at 600 DPI and scaled
to a uniform height of 768 pixels. The quality of the original
printing isn't all that good—the ink blots and occasional
missing letters were there from the start; there is almost no
degradation due to age apart from yellowing of the paper (which isn't
evident in these greyscale images).