Julia Newberry's Diary

New York: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.. Very Good in Good dj. (c.1933). First Edition. Hardcover. [modest wear to book at extremities, one-time owner's signature and date on front endpaper, some discoloration in gutters; the jacket shows quite a bit of fading, especially along the spine which is all but unreadable, tiny bits of paper loss at several corners]. A valuable document of American social history (of a particular strata of society) during a two-year period not long after the end of the Civil War. The diarist, Julia Newberry, was a young member of what passed for an aristocratic American family in those days: her father, Walter Loomis Newberry, was an early Chicago pioneer who made his fortune in banking, real estate, and various other commercial enterprises. His daughter, therefore, had a decidedly privileged upbringing, which is reflected in the content of her diary: she "begins her diary in Chicago [in 1869], comes East to private school on the Hudson, spends much time at the old Brevoort Hotel and in Florida among the society of the day; and it ends in Europe with the news of the Chicago fire" in 1871. Julia herself died in Rome in 1876; an "After Word" by one of her relatives explains how the existence of her diary came to be discovered, in 1930, and how the publishers agreed that the text should "be kept intact in the printed volume, even to the spelling and grammar, so that none of the original character may be lost." (In case you're wondering, by the way, Walter Newberry was *that* Newberry, from whose estate Chicago's famed Newberry Library was endowed.) .