Five items relating to Roberts Brothers, famed Boston publishers from the Civil War to the end of the 19th century: T[homas] Niles. Autograph Letter Signed, 1 pg. on Roberts Brothers stationery (with mailing envelope), Boston, March 9 [1885?] to Grace Atkinson Oliver; two bank checks from Roberts Brothers to Edward Everett Hale, June 28 and July 17, 1890, endorsed by Hale on verso; E. St. Elmo Lewis, 2 Autograph Letters Signed as Business Manager of “Footlights / A Clean Paper for the Theater Goer”, Philadelphia, Sept. 18, 1895 and July 25, 1896, 4 pp. To Roberts Brothers’ last managing director, Eugene Hardy; and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Autograph Letter Signed, Cambridge, Mass., Dec. 1897, 1 pg. postcard to Roberts Brothers, shortly before the company was sold to Little, Brown.
Having begun business in 1857 as Boston bookbinders, the three Roberts Brothers began lucrative production of the first American photograph albums at the start of the Civil War. After their brother-in-law Thomas Niles eventually took charge of the firm, the company published Louisa May Alcott’s best-selling Little Women in 1868, then added to their list the works of many notable American women authors, as well as American imprints of European writers like George Sand.
Niles’ letter to Mrs. Oliver concerns her biography of Maria Edgeworth and an older British novel by Margaret Oliphant. The checks to Edward Everett Hale were possibly royalty payments for the 1891 reprint of his famous “Man Without A Country”, though Roberts also reprinted his 1873 anthology which included a prophetic story about launching an earth satellite, 84 years before Sputnik. Lewis, later one of America’s leading advertising men, was trying to interest the publishers in his literary reviews. And the note by Higginson, a prolific author best remembered for his 1870 Civil War memoir about commanding a Black regiment, asked for copies of a book of his poems Roberts had published 4 years before. An interesting small archive of American fin-de-siecle literature.