Text Box: To order an item, copy the information and paste it in an email to The Personal Navigator. Include your Visa or MasterCard information , or request PayPal®. You may also call us at either number listed below and give us your order. We also take checks and money orders. This page is provided by The Personal Navigator, Sam Coulbourn, who spends his days and nights pawing through stacks of books and papers to find antique and curious items that he hopes will delight you. Address: 7 Mill Lane, Rockport, MA, 01966 USA. E-mail: persnav@shore.net. Tel. (978) 546-7138. Picture at top of each page shows Amphibious Helicopter Carrier USS Kearsarge (LHD-3) with rails manned, passing Statue of Liberty. (U.S. Navy) ©2011. All rights reserved. Revised Saturday, February 26, 2011.

The Personal Navigator Antique Books, Maps, Papers &c.

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Text Box: We offer plenty of links to our various categories in our Site Map. If you like handwritten trips into the past, with old postcards, journals, diaries, autograph books and such, visit our American Originals. Be sure to look at our catalogue, NEWSPAPERS IN HISTORY. We have some fascinating papers where you can see perhaps a tiny mention of something that you know turned out to be a major historical event! When you are ready to order, simply call or email us! —The Personal Navigator Our latest acquisitions…. Added Saturday, Feb. 26, 2011: Mexico: Campbell's New Revised Complete Guide and Descriptive Book of Mexico by Campbell, Reau1 1909 Chicago, IL: Reau Campbell. Very attractive, fresh-looking guide book to Mexico, written by a long-term scholar and traveler in Mexico, with many black and white photographs, taken in years before Pancho Villa and the events of 1914. Frontispiece is Photograph of President of Mexico, Porfirio Diaz (1830-1915). This book has geography, history, information about all parts of country. Chronology of events includes 1908 merging of two national railroads. Includes a very nice fold-out colored map of Mexico and inset maps of Mexico, D.F., etc. 352 pp. 14 x 18.7 cm. Maroon cloth on board with gilt decoration including Aztec figure and title. Spine title slightly faded, small crack inside rear hinge, yet very good. (4143) $26.00. Travel Pettingell-Andrews Co. Lighting Furniture, Catalog No. 5 ca. 1910 Boston, MA: Pettingell-Andrews Co., Corner Pearl St. and Atlantic Ave. Large format catalog of lighting fixtures, or "lighting furniture". Commercial Lighting: H and B Celestialites; Keldon, Trojan, Ace; Duplex-a-lite; X-Ray Eye Comfort Indirect Lighting; Four-in-one Light; Aglight all glass; Brascolite. 48 pp. 27 x 40 cm. Catalogue, worn, front cover worn, back cover and price list missing; 15 x 3 cm strip from edge of pp 5-6 detached. Poor. (8119) $60.00. Advertising Hattie's 1874 Diary (Handwritten) by Weston, Hattie 1874 Hancock, NH: Handwritten diary. Hattie Weston is a young girl living in Hancock Village in New Hampshire, and she is the most hopeful, optimistic, positive girl you will hope to encounter. She writes about her daily life with Mother, Edward, younger brother Ned, her work in the house, her teaching scholars, and attending the "Good Templars", Temperance organization. She goes shopping in Peterboro. She plays the organ, and attends prayer services and Meeting. Last entry is Sunday, Oct. 25, 1874, when she writes that she went to meeting, enjoyed the sermon, but confesses that "my thoughts were wayward." This little diary gives reader a marvelous insight into a young woman's life in the last half of the Nineteenth Century Standard diary with almanac material, postage rates, currency, weights and measures, etc. printed in front. Pencil and ink entries for about 60% of book, remainder blank. Mentions friends Lettie Goodhue, Ida Johnson. ~400 pp. 6.5 x 10 cm. Leather diary, standard 19th century type, spine and leather closure flap badly suffering from biopredation, text block very good. (8124) $48.00. American Originals/Ephemera

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Three personal handwritten  diaries (1879-1881)  in the life of Eliot C. Clarke, Principal Assistant Engineer for Improved Sewerage, the man who built the Boston Sewer System 1878-1881 Boston, MA: City of Boston.  The man responsible for building and maintaining Boston's sewer system in the years after the Civil War kept these handwritten diaries of his work from Sep. 7, 1878 to Dec. 19, 1881.  Clarke was a prominent figure in Public Health and Civil Engineering in those days, and his work was interconnected not only with building, maintaining and expanding Boston's storm drain and sewer system, but the many railroads and horse railways criss-crossing the city, as well as streets and the system of collecting slops, house trash and ashes from residences and businesses all over the city, and collecting and disposing of dead animals daily.  Clarke gave papers at national Public Health forums, and wrote a mountain of documentation on Boston's sewer system, covering sewer design, interconnections, manholes, pumps, and sewage through pipes that could backflood during high tides, causing noxious gases to back up in cellars across the city. He found a solution in intercepting sewer systems, and described this in a presentation at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1879, and later in a book published in 1885. His diaries record daily encounters with his fellow administrators and engineers, foremen, developers, builders, politicians and the public.  His writing is organized, literate and complete. 7.3 x 12 cm. Three small booklets one 9.7 x 15 cm, pages nearly all filled; two 7.5 x 12 Standard 19th c. diaries, gilt edged pages, very good. In 1880 one-third of pages are filled out, in 1881, one-half are filled out. All very good. (8111) $480.00. American Originals/Engineering
Text Box: Handwritten Diaries— Building a sewer system for Boston, 1878-81

Three diaries kept by noted pioneer in sanitary sewer systems detail daily work all over Boston.

Oregon Trail: On the Oregon Trail in 1851: Canaries, Buffalo-Chips, and Elephants by Belanger, Albert Edward 2011 Salt Lake City, UT:  American University and Colleges Press. 454 pp. 13.3 x 20.3 cm. Fascinating collection of individual traveler accounts gleaned from upwards of 7000 emigrants who made the overland journey on the Oregon Trail in the year 1851.  Through the words of some 75 different pioneers, Belanger transports readers on what has been called the Greatest Voluntary Migration in history. Illus. Index. Trade paperback. New.  (2556) $32.66. History.