Preview · Page 1 of 2
Meet the Book
This is the book’s own stage: the Falls themselves — from Maude’s own title vignette, “Niagara from a Cavern” — stand on the stage while John Maude’s book is read whole, aloud: the summer of 1800, before any bridge, hotel, staircase, or railroad had reached Niagara — the ride west from New York, the first sight of the Falls, Table Rock, and the descent to the river’s bed by moonlight — with “Hail, Columbia” (1789), the American air of Maude’s own day, playing low beneath the words. Isabella Bird’s Niagara chapter of 1856 stands at the end as a second witness, in a second voice, so the two testimonies stand apart. The bookstore barcode rides every frame — scan any moment to come back to this bookstore.
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Preview · Page 2 of 2
What’s Inside
- The complete 1826 journal: the Dedication and Preface, New York and the Hudson, Albany and the Saratoga Road, the Mohawk Road and the Genesee Falls, the approach to Niagara, the First Sight, Moonlight, the Whirlpool, and Farewell, Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence, Montreal, Quebec, and Montmorency, the Return by Lake Champlain and the Hudson, and Maude’s own Remarks — routes, distances, and expenses — every word as he printed it.
- 6 hours 57 minutes of narration — Maude read aloud in a clear woman’s voice, and Isabella Bird in a second voice, in a reading room you can follow with your eyes, while the Falls stand on the stage and “Hail, Columbia” plays low beneath.
- The book’s pictures — all nine of them: the eight engraved plates and the title vignette, drawn by Maude on the tour and engraved by J. Cousen — the Great Horse-Shoe Fall and Table Rock on the cover.
- A second witness — Isabella Bird saw the Falls fifty-six years after Maude, when the hotels had come; her whole Niagara chapter from The Englishwoman in America (1856) closes the book, so the two testimonies stand apart and the reader may weigh them.
- The barcode rides every stage frame — scan any moment to come back to this bookstore.
This is the public-domain text of John Maude’s Visit to the Falls of Niagara in 1800 (London, 1826). No authority file records the year of John Maude’s death — he is listed only as “active 1826” — and the book says so plainly in its opening disclaimer: he was a grown man travelling in America from 1793 onward, so on any possible span of a human life he has been dead for well over one hundred years, and his book, two hundred years old, is in the public domain. Isabella Bird died in 1904. The narration is a synthesized reading (Piper — Lessac for Maude, Amy for Bird) of those texts, made for this edition; the figure on the stage is the Falls from Maude’s own drawings. Editor: Franklin Langston.
franklinlangston.gumroad.com/l/azibdj
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