Massa’s in the Cold Cold Ground + Forget Me Nots (Gertrude Shaw).
Sizes: 9 x 7 1/4 in. 8 x 6 5/8 in.
Massa’s in De Cold Cold Ground was written by Stephen Foster and published in New York and Boston in 1888 by H M Caldwell. It was originally written by Foster as Massa’s in De Cold Ground and published by Firth Pond in 1852, with lyrics that voiced the love of black slaves for their master. It was written as a minstrel song and mentions darkeys who mourned the loss of their master, but that was not the reality back then, not for the most part. Slaves were treated harshly, and their mistreatment was a cause of the Civil War.
Stephen Foster (1828 - 1864) was born in Pennsylvania and became known as the father of American music, he was a famous composer who wrote over 200 songs, including Oh! Susanna, My Old Kentucky Home, and Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair, and My Old Kentucky Home is now the official state song of Kentucky and Old Folks at Home is now the official state song of Florida.
The book measures 9 x 7 1/4 inches wide, with red cloth, gilt lettering, and colored floral decorations on the front cover, floral decorated endpapers with the owner’s inscription dated 1919 on the front flyleaf, the half-title, a frontis portrait by Charles Copeland, then the title page, the copyright page which says the lyrics were first composed in 1852 and published by Firth Pond, then they were copyrighted by Stephen Foster’s wife in 1880, and this amended title was finally copyrighted in 1888 by Ticknor and Company, then a page which says the drawings and engravings were printed under the supervision of A V S Anthony. The book is unpaginated, but it has 29 pages of text and illustrations after the supervision page, including a page with lyrics set to music and a drawing of the master’s tomb at the end.
The book is in very good condition, it is tight, with clean pages and text, with bumps at the crown and light rubbing on the spine and at the tips, and the page with the drawing of the master’s tomb has a light pink stain at the top of the page and that’s it.
Gertrude E Shaw (1864 - ), probably Gertrude E Metcalfe Shaw, was a British Suffragette and writer. She was arrested twice (1913 and 1914) and awarded a Hunger Strike Medal for trying to encourage people to give women the right to vote. She moved to Canada during the war and by 1918 was living in Michigan.
The Hunger Strike Medal was a silver medal awarded between August 1909 and 1914 to suffragette prisoners by the leadership of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU). During their imprisonment, they went on hunger strike while serving their sentences in British prisons for acts of militancy in their campaign for women's suffrage. Many women were force-fed and their individual medals were created to reflect this.
In October 2024 her WSPU medal and suffragette story were featured on the BBC version of the Antiques Roadshow, where experts valued her medal and family mementoes at £25,000 to £30,000.
The Forget-Me-Nots book is a beautiful antiquarian poetry book with gilt lettering and a gilt-decorated cover, turquoise blue endpapers, a Coleridge poem on the frontis page, the decorated title page says it was published in London Belfast, and New York by Marcus Ward, and it is undated, but Marcus Ward was an Irish publishing company known for its illustrated books for children and adults, as well as its decorative greeting cards. It was founded in 1833 and went under in 1899, so the Gertrude Shaw book was probably published in the late 1890’s.
There are lyrics and colored floral designs on each page, and twenty pages of text plus the frontis and title page, and all the edges are gilt. The book measures 8 x 6 5/8 inches wide and is in exquisite condition. It is crisp, clean, and tight, with bright colors and illustrations, and light rubbing on the heel and crown of the spine and that’s it.
The two books are rare - we found only one copy of Massa’s in De Cold Cold Ground and only one copy of Forget-Me-Nots listed on the rare book website we use.
#6156
