Wall Street)

A Selection of Poems, and other elegant poetical extracts . By the most celebrated authors, from Pope, Goldsmith, Blair, Young, Cowper, Watts, Rowe, Gray, More.

      Boston: Joseph Bumstead 1807 - Contemporary sheep. 300 pp, pp. 193-212 removed. Some wear, contemporary clippings mounted at front and back, but generally in very good condition. FIRST EDITION. This book is from the library of the celebrated Tontine Coffee House, original home of the New York Stock Exchange. This book includes Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard, Pope's Essay on Man, Washington's Farewell Address, and other works. Mounted at the front and back are early newspaper clippings of poems of interest to merchants and traders on subjects such as Gaming, Slander, Seduction, Envy and Fortitude. The origin of the New York Stock Exchange dates to the Buttonwood Agreement signed in 1792 at the Merchants' Coffee House. The merchants then joined forces to build the famed Tontine Building in 1792-94 at the corner of Water and Wall Streets as a "centre for the daily intercourse of the mercantile community" (Valentine's Manual, 1854, p. 458). The Tontine Coffee House immediately became the locus of business for the Merchant's Exchange, which became the New York Stock & Exchange Board in 1817. The ownership structure was a tontine in which each subscriber selected a nominee. At the death of the nominee, his ownership interest ceased and was merged with those of the survivors, until only seven remained and become equal partners. The Tontine Coffee House was a center of financial and political life and figures time and again in the letters and literature of the early Federalist period. Provenance: mounted at the front as a bookplate is a rare wood engraving of the Tontine Coffee House measuring 2 1/2 x 3 3/4 in. The image is signed three times by James Bryden, who ran of the Tontine Coffee House from 1808 to 1812. The most prominent of the signatures, "J. Bryden's," being crossed out by the subsequent owner and replaced with the inscription "T. C. Hayward's book." This is the only known copy of one of the earliest images of the Tontine Coffee House. We cannot trace another example of this image. [Attributes: First Edition; Hard Cover]