OP: The Cherries of New York
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J. B. Lyon Company, Albany, 1915. Hardcover. Good Plus.
In 1905, the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station launched a remarkable and invaluable series of books, recording the historical, scientific, cultural, and economic impact of the fruits of New York, beginning with the two-volume The Apples of New York written by horticulturalist Spencer Ambrose Beach (1860–1922).
The six following books in the series were put together by fellow botanist Ulysses Prentiss Hedrick (1870–1951), covering grapes (1908), plums (1911), cherries (1915), peaches (1917), pears (1921), and small fruits (1925). All of them are prized for not only their wealth of information but also for—and by some scoundrels who cut the books apart only for—their color plate inserts, produced by Zeese-Wilkinson Company.
This volume on cherries has suffered some of the aforementioned plate poaching. It is missing about a dozen of the 56 original plates, in addition to a few chunks of text, roughly 24 pages in all.
Beyond that, the binding is sturdy and the text clean, so lovers of poetic writing will still have plenty of opportunity to read about and admire the Kirtland cherry, “hardly surpassed in richness and delicacy of flavor,” its “flesh firm and meaty;” or the Prunus Tomentosa, “vigorous, dense-topped, hard…branchlets many, of medium thickness and length, thickly over spread with short pubescence, with short internodes, roughish…” Best for the casual reader, not the fastidious collector. (9.5” x 12.25”, 371 pages).
