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CAPTAIN CHARLES EDWIN GOOD : LATE 1880s, EARLY 1890s ORIGINAL SCRAPBOOK OF OVER 400 ILLUSTRATIONS, CUT OUTS, AND PHOTOGRAPHS, ALL PERTAINING TO THE AUTHOR’S DEEP AND WILDLY PASSIONATE ‘MARRIAGE’ TO ALL ‘THINGS PERTAINING TO THE OCEAN’

4to - over 9¾" - 12" tall. On offer is a rare and one-of-a-kind love song of sorts, a scrapbook of the people, places, and vessels that make up the allure of the sea and the life of a steamboat Captain. The book is question is a fantastic scrapbook featuring roughly 400 illustrations spread out of over 145 pages. There are also hundreds of clippings from newspapers, magazines and books and over 20 photographs pasted onto thick paper. The owner of the book and creator of this wholly unique book is the Steamboat Captain Charles Edwin Good, captain of the steamer ‘Rose Standish’. Charles E. Good was a steamboat Captain for the Boston & Hingham Steamboat Company and the ‘Rose Standish’ was a passenger steamer that carried passengers between Boston, Hull, and Hingham, Massachusetts. The frontispiece shows a sepia-toned photograph of the steamer in question, the ‘Rose Standish’ along with a name is all capital letters, “C. E. GOOD”. The title page states him as “Married to things pertaining to the ocean”. What he is married to are all the illustrations, photographs, and clippings that make up this extraordinary book: various cultures and people; exotic places; shipwrecks and petulant weather; deserted isles; ports of call around the world; steamers, sloops-of-war, ferries, ironclads, frigates and all manners of sailing vessel; naval battles contemporary and classic; canals, docks, and harbors; rivers and oceans; Leviathans and other sea monsters; and so much more, relating to the sea and all that comes with it. This is truly a scrapbook created by a man who loves the ocean and the sea, and the extraordinary range of human activities that come with the sailing life. Near the end of the book come the photographs, black and white, and split evenly between photographs of beautiful masted sailing vessels, and of shorelines and harbors and Capes. The photographer’s name is visible on one of the photographs: Charles L. Hovey. The author photographs have no name attributed to them, but the style of the photographs is so similar it would seem most likely that they are Hovey’s work as well. The illustrations and such date from the late 1880s to the early 1890s, so it is likely that this was scrapbook was put together after Charles Good had retired from the Boston & Hingham Steamboat Company and the sailing life. He would die in 1894. The front cover also has the name of his son, Charles Morse Good and the date 1896, possibly when he inherited the book from the estate of his recently deceased father. There is also, written in pencil, provenancial information, stating the book was purchased in 1973 from the author Elizabeth Coatsworth Beston, and written by a man named John P. Richardson. This is a brilliant and exceptionally unique scrapbook of one man’s lifelong love to the sailing the ocean. It is a treasure that deserves to be cherished and preserved. The book is 7 ½ x 9 ¾ inches in hardcover. There are worn marbled boards with what is left of leather corners and spine and the spine’s entire leather backstrip’s gone. The binding is still tight however. There are about 3 or 4 pages that have detached from the binding. There is light to moderate foxing on some of the photograph plates but overall the pages are still in good condition. (background: Charles Edwin Good was born at Hallowell, Maine, Oct. 4, 1836; married in Hingham Elizabeth J. Easterbrook, a daughter of shipmaster Samuel Easterbrook (1810-1883);; resided on Cottage Street. Good died on Aug. 27, 1894 of consumption, better known today as Tuberculosis. The steamer Rose Standish carried passengers between Boston, Hull, and Hingham (about eleven miles down Boston Bay). She had a saloon on the upper deck. Built in 1863 at Brooklyn, NY; was sunk by a collision with a tugboat in the Boston harbor on Aug. 28, 1884; was raised and repaired. She seems to have lasted until at least 1920. After that, I could find no more information on her.) OVERALL: G+. Manuscript. Book Condition: Good +

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