SMITH, Laura Grover

The House of Bishops. The General Convention, Minneapolis, 1895

First edition. Tall octavo. Blue cloth. Illustrated from photographs. Top of the titlepage is trimmed, probably to remove an owner's name, and effecting no printing, else near fine. The book, which consists mostly of portraits of American Bishops, has been used by a former owner an autograph album, affixing the signatures of all but one of the pictured Bishops, mostly with signatures cut from letters, as well as with the signatures of other Bishops not pictured. Over seventy signatures. Included are succesive Presiding Bishops of the Episcopal Church of America, John Williams and Thomas March Clark; Henry Benjamin Whipple, who worked tirelessly for Native Americans; the first African-American member of The House of Bishops, Samuel D. Ferguson, Missionary Bishop to Cape Palmas in Liberia, the first Liberian Episcopal Bishop, and the founder of the Cuttington Collegiate and Divinity School there; and the signature (but not portrait) of the first African-American Episcopal Bishop, James T. Holly, Bishop of Haiti.

[BTC #44590]