From the Collection

The oldest and, arguably, most valuable books in the library’s collection is the second English edition, three-volume set of Meriwether Lewis and William Clarke’s Travels to the Source of the Missouri River and Across the American Continent to the Pacific Ocean. Performed by Order of the Government of the United States, In the Years 1804, 1805, and 1806. This text was published in London in 1815 by Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown.

Lewis and Clarke had always planned on publishing their journals, but the continuance of their official military duties, followed by Lewis’s untimely death in 1809, delayed the process significantly. Clarke finally sought help from the American financier Nicholas Biddle to edit and make the texts publishable, and in 1814 the accounts of their expedition across the North American West were published out of Philadelphia.

That original (American) work was published in octavo format, where one large sheet of paper is folded three times to produce eight sheets, each 1/8^th the size of the original. For the English (British) copy, these sheets were shipped to publisher Thomas Rees with Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, who edited the text to suit the interests of a British audience. Rees chose to omit the original preface (he wrote his own), a section written by Thomas Jefferson titled “Life of Captain Lewis,” and the book’s appendix. Rees omitted the appendix because he believed its contents would not interest British readers since they dealt mostly with United States Indian affairs, which he deemed “altogether of a local nature.” Thankfully, Rees left in an 1806 letter by Thomas Jefferson describing the voyage, as well as excerpts from an 1805 letter between Lewis to Jefferson.

The original 1814 American edition appears to have been sold in one volume, although this is difficult to verify due to its rarity. The first British edition was sold in two volumes, and the second edition, the version owned by the Library and pictured below, came in three “more manageable” volumes. The books’ covers are “half calf over board,” a bookbinding process in which the spine and outer corners are covered in calf leather for protection, and the remaining sections are made of marbled paper.