[California Pictorial Letter Sheet]: Hutchings, James M.:

$2,000 · Offered by William Reese Company · No longer available

THE MINER'S TEN COMMANDMENTS [caption title]. A landmark Gold Rush satire, and the most popular of California pictorial letter sheets. James Mason Hutchings was something of a Christian activist and was particularly involved in the Sabbath movement, urging church attendance and for businesses in mining districts to close for the day (their "indiscretions" are lampooned here in Commandment IV). He originally wrote the text of The Miner's Ten Commandments in response to this and other generally "sinful" behavior around the mines, and published it in the Placerville Herald. When Hutchings saw that other newspapers were pirating the text he decided to secure his copyright by publishing it as a letter sheet. He eventually had thousands of copies produced, going from mining camp to mining camp, selling them himself.This is the first of three editions of this enormously successful letter sheet (Hutchings himself claimed that he sold 97,000 copies in a year), with the apostrophe between the R and S of "Miner's." This letter sheet launched Hutchings' publishing career, which would include dozens more letter sheets, broadsides, periodicals, and books. This letter sheet prints the three-column text of the "commandments" surrounded by woodcut scenes of each, the illustrations drawn by the talented Harrison Eastman. Samples of the commandments include "Thou shalt have no other claim than one," "Thou shalt not remember what thy friends do at home on the Sabbath day," "Thou shalt not kill t

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