Author: Cousins, Frank.

Publisher: Massachusetts: Frank Cousins Art Co.

Format: Hardcover quarto with green boards, annotated “Salem Photos” in ink on spine, 24 x 30cm.

Contains 90 laid-down albumen paper photographs of architectural details, interiors, staircases and fireplaces, and two tombstones, each stamped “Pub. By Frank Cousins Art Co., Salem, Mass. All publishing rights reserved” verso.

Frank Cousins (American, 1851–1925) was born in Salem, Massachusetts, “and began a career in photographing historic houses around his hometown. He is credited with making architectural photography into a specialty discipline. He photographed colonial architecture, as well as decorative elements that he found aesthetically rich on other types of structures. About 15,000 of Cousins’s photographs are on file today in the offices of architects. His photographs were collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which owns about 700 of his prints. Dr. Peter Jessen of the Industrial Art Commission of Berlin at one time owned about 600, and J. Pierpont Morgan once owned about 400.” Ref: New York Preservation Archives Project. The Phillips Library at the Peabody Essex Museum also holds a large collection of his work.

Cousins would publish three books on Salem architecture: Colonial Architecture, Series 1: Fifty Salem Doorways, 1912; The Colonial Architecture of Salem, 1916; and The Wood-Carver of Salem: Samuel McIntire, His Life and Work, 1916.

Front cover slightly bowed, heavy scuffing and wear to boards, edgewear, hinges slightly split but binding fully intact, slight silvering to photographs.