A Hieroglyphic Geography of the United States. Part I Containing the State of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New York

NY: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1875. Hardcover. Very good. Quarto. (24)ff. A rare 19th-century entrant in the peculiar genre of the rebus, Heermans and Cogswell's geography recalls the hieroglyphic bibles that proliferated in the United States since the late 18th century, when Isaiah Thomas published his A Curious Hieroglyphick Bible. Each state receives a full-page description made up of a bemusing arrangement of engravings, text, numerals, ampersands, and the occasional solitary "s" and/or "d." The design experiments, somewhat incautiously, with both semiotics and phonetics. Sometimes the image refers to what it represents, so that a stand of trees in Maine really is "forest," pluralized by the proximate "s." Elsewhere, however, the image is only useful as a homophone, as when a bow supplies the "bow" in Bowdoin. The surfeit of engravings, each one apparently unique, sometimes leads to a true riddle, either because the picture has more than one possible referent or because the referent is a specific name, often of the idiosyncratic New England variety. Both are present in Rhode Island, where a swan emerging from reeds provides the "neck" in "Aquidneck." To great relief, an answer key appears just after the rebus description. Both Heermans and Cogswell were alumnae of the Cooper Hewitt Engraving School. The title of the volume suggests plans for further entries in the series, but none were apparently published, probably no thanks to a contemporary (December 10, 1874) review in The Nation which worried over the prevalence "insoluble riddles" and the moments when what is presented "is not hieroglyphic at all." Regardless, the book stands as a intersection between competing methods of language acquisition and instruction, and the role of art in pedagogy. Bound in full orange cloth over boards, embossed in blind and titled in gilt. Mild rubs overall and stray soiling to covers, miniscule loss to head of spine, else very good.