Two Maritime Books 1930’s. These two books are titled “South Street: A Maritime History Of New York” by Richard C. McKay and “Steamboat Days” by Fred Erving Dayton. “South Street” was written by McKay and published in New York by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in 1934 and it is a first edition because there is just a single date on the copyright page and no other printings. The book has beige boards with black lettering on the spine and front cover, blank endpapers with “Gene Ashley 1935” inscribed on the front flyleaf, a half-title, a frontispiece with 24 colored flags representing different shipping lines, the title page, an Acknowledgments page, fourteen pages of Contents, a two-page List of Illustrations, 433 pages of text, then a Complete List of Merchants and Commercial Houses located on South Street in 1852 (from pages 432 to 450), a one-page List of City Wharves on the East River in 1853, and an Index that runs from 453 to page 460. The book measures 9 1/2 x 6 1/4 in. wide, with a tight binding and clean pages, there’s light soiling on the spine and covers and at the bottom edges of the pages (you have to lift the book from the bottom to see the dark edges), creases and light brown spots on a couple of pages of text and the last page of the Index, and that’s pretty much it. “Steamboat Days” was written by Dayton, illustrated by John Wolcott Adams, and put out by Tudor Publishing in 1939, it has blue boards with gilt lettering on the spine and gilt-decorated front covers, blank endpapers with the inscription of “R Eugene Ashley 40” on the front paste-down, a label from Lauriat’s Books in Boston at the bottom of the front flyleaf, a colored plate of the “Clermont, The First Commercial Steamboat” for the frontis, then the title page, the copyright page says the book was first published by Frederick A. Stokes in 1925 and by Tudor Publishing in 1939, which makes this a first edition thus by Tudor, two pages of Contents, a three-page list of Illustrations (for a total of 85 illustrations in the book, including the frontispiece), and 436 pages of text. “Steamboat Days” measures 9 5/8 x 6 1/2 in. wide, with a tight binding and clean pages and text, the gilt is faded on the spine, there’s light wear at the heel and crown of the spine, light rubbing along the edges of the spine, light white spots on the front cover, light wear at the tips, a smidge of blue marks on the edge of the last page of the text and a light blue mark across the top of the pages - you can only see it when you look down on the top of the book - two tips are turned in, and the two books are chock full of details about the maritime history of New York and the history of steamboats in this country from the 1800’s to the early 1900’s. See Bill McBride’s “A Pocket Guide to the Identification of First Editions” published in 1995. #156 #1617