FullReads

This Essay bedstead is sold for four hundred and fifty dollars. Another design, with the case and bed in black walnut, the books in papier mache, and none but English essayists in the Collection, can be had for a hundred dollars.

A British Poets’ folding-bed can be had for three hundred dollars. This is an imitation of the blue-and-gold edition published in Boston some years ago. Busts of Shakespeare and of Wordsworth appear at the front upper corners of the book-case, and these serve as pedestals to the machine when it is unfolded into a bedstead. This style, we are told by Professor Thorpe, has been officially indorsed by the poetry committee of the Chicago Literary Club. A second design, in royal octavo white pine, and omitting the works of Chaucer, Spenser, Ben Jonson, and Herrick, is quoted at a hundred and fifty dollars.

The Historical folding-bed contains complete sets of Hume, Gibbon, Guizot, Prescott, Macaulay, Bancroft, Lingard, Buckle, etc., together with Haines’s “History of Lake-County Indians” and Peck’s “Gazetteer of Illinois,” bound in half calf, and having a storage space of three feet by fourteen inches to each row, there being six rows of these books. You can get this folding-bed for two hundred dollars, or there is a second set in cloth that can be had for a hundred dollars.

The Dramatists’ folding-bed (No. 1) costs three hundred dollars, bound in tree-calf hard maple, the case being in polished cherry, elaborately carved. The works included in this library are Shakespeare’s, Schiller’s, Moliere’s, Goethe’s, Jonson’s, Bartley Campbell’s, and many others. Style No. 2 of this folding-bed has not yet been issued, owing to some difficulty which Professor Thorpe has had with eastern publishers; but when the matter of copyright has been adjusted, the works of Plautus, Euripides, Thucydides, and other classic dramatists will be brought out for the delectation of appreciative Chicagoans.

The Novelists’ bed can be had in numerous styles. One contains the novels of Mackenzie, Fielding, Smollett, Walpole, Dickens, Thackeray, and Scott, and is bound in tree-calf: another, better adapted to the serious-minded (especially to young women), is made up of the novels of Maria Edgeworth, Miss Jane Porter, Miss Burney, and the Rev. E. P. Roe. This style can be had for fifty dollars. But the Novelists’ folding-bed is manufactured in a dozen different styles, and one should consult the catalogue before ordering.