COLLEGE SONG BOOK. A Collection of American College Songs with Piano-Forte Accompaniment.
Boston: Henry Toman & Co., 1860. First Edition. Hardcover. The first known collection of college songs drawn from multiple campuses. The collection includes the first printing of “Fair Harvard”, the college’s alma mater. Tall octavo: 72 pp. Original blue cloth binding, with gilt-stamped titling and blind-stamped borders and ornaments. The first signature is a bit proud. Some general toning and wear along the extremities of the boards, with an extremely faint stain to the bottom of the front panel.
Yale and Princeton both published songbooks in 1853, the first of their kind. But both volumes focused solely on the repertoire of each individual campus. Stevens was the first to produce what was to become a standard of music publishing: an anthology of songs from multiple campuses, in this case Harvard, Yale, Williams, and Dartmouth, with both words and music. “It is hoped that the new feature of piano-forte accompaniments will be acceptable to amateurs,” he says in the preface. In doing so, he also included the first known printing of the music and words to “He’s a Jolly Good Fellow”, verses included in “It’s a Way We Have at Old Harvard”.
Dr. Charles Wistar Stevens (1836-1901), a member of the Harvard Class of 1860 and Harvard Medical School Class of 1870, settled in Charlestown where he practiced medicine for the rest of his life. According to his obituaries published in Boston newspapers, Stevens published several other works, including Up the Hudson, Three Cities of Paris, The Education of Women from a German Standpoint, and Curiosities of the Human Hair. Good. Item #79986
Price: $75.00