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In the 1890s, Moses King of Boston published comprehensive guides for the cities of Boston and New York, and a 940-page guide of the United States. King’s Handbook of New York City (with 928 pages and 889 illustrations) was a companion volume to King’s Photographic Views of New York (700 pages and 450 illustrations), and Notable New Yorkers of 1896-1899 (616 pages and 2332 portraits). All three books were hard-bound octavos. Many complimentary copies of the books were distributed by businesses.
For later publications, King switched to paper-bound quartos of approximately 100 pages, each crammed with photos, and mortared with text. These paper quartos included the King’s Views of the New York Stock Exchange (with 1,061 illustrations: 968 portraits and 93 views), and a series of King’s Views... which by 1915 had covered much of metropolitan New York. Again, many copies were distributed as promotions, with the cover carrying the name of some substantial New York City business.
The preface of King’s Handbook presents his purpose and accomplishment:
Never before has any one put forth an illustrated history and description of New York City in a single volume at all comparable with “King’s Handbook.” This volume contains exactly 928 pages, more than 850 illustrations, thirty chapters, and an index of twenty pages with 60 columns, containing over 4,600 items and about 20,000 references. The text furnishes an elaborate but condensed history and description of the city itself, and also of every notable public institution and especially interesting feature. The illustrations give many reminders of the past, and furnish an extensive series of pictures of the present city, to an extent many times beyond that of any volume yet published. Every plate has been made expressly for this book, and so were nearly all of the original photographs. The whole has been carefully printed on an exceptionally fine quality of paper. Altogether, it is the handsomest, the most thorough, the largest, the most costly, and the most profusely illustrated book of its class ever issued for any city in the world. Moreover, at its retail price of One Dollar, it is the cheapest book of any class ever offered to the public.
See the table of contents for this book.
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