THE LAWSON HISTORY OF THE AMERICA'S CUP : A Record of Fifty Years, by Winfield M. Thompson and Thomas W. Lawson. COPY OF THOMAS W. LAWSON, with his bookplate tipped onto a blank prelim page.

BOSTON: MCMII (1902). Privately Printed, First Edition, with the date 1902 on the title and copyright page, with no indication of additional printings. LIMITED EDITION, this being copy #93 of only 3000 copies.

Hardcover Book in Slipcase, brown cloth covered boards with gilt lettering and gilt embossed designs on the front cover and spine, a leather spine title label lettered in gilt, and a small gilt embossed design on the rear cover; gilt top page edges, 8x12 inches. Pagination: xv, 402 pages, plus 89 unnumbered PLATES and their captioned tissue guards. In a cloth and paper covered boards slipcase.

GOOD condition: The covers have some toning, rubs, and light soiling; the top of the rear cover has some shorelining; overall these original covers are solid and the gilt is bright. Internally, the front and rear inner hinges are reinforced with white cloth tape, there is a split between a couple signatures at the front and rear but they are holding well, the pages are lightly toned, there is a bit of scattered foxing here and there. Overall a solid, nice, presentable copy, complete with all its plates and tissue guards. The slipcase has some light soiling but is sturdy and doing its job well.

SCARCE, especially so with the low copy number (#93) and the THOMAS W. LAWSON BOOKPLATE.

About THOMAS W. LAWSON (from Wikipedia and other Internet sources):

******Thomas William Lawson, b.1857 d.1925, was an American businessman, writer, and shipbuilder. A highly controversial Boston stock promoter, he is known for both his efforts to promote reforms in the stock markets and the fortune he amassed for himself through highly dubious stock manipulations.

Lawson said he ran away at the age of 12 from his widowed mother, left school and managed on his own until he found work in a stockbroker's office. At 17 he was trading stocks and by the time he was 30 he was a millionaire (billionaire in today's dollars)..

Like many wealthy men of the era, Lawson liked to build things. Not just houses and companies but boats and ships. No matter what the scale, Lawson took a shot. His most well known attempts at building ships reveal the type of man Lawson was. First in 1900, Lawson built the Independence. He put the sloop forward as a contender to defend the 1901 America's Cup. When told by the New York Yacht Club that he needed to be a club member to compete or put the Independence in another member's name, Lawson refused. He would only compete, as the boat's name suggested, as an independent. The Club denied his entry.

In 1902 he built the "Thomas W. Lawson", a seven-masted, steel-hulled schooner which was used primarily to haul coal and oil along the East Coast of the United States. At the time it was the largest schooner and largest sailing vessel without an auxiliary engine ever built. The Thomas W. Lawson was destroyed off the uninhabited island of Annet, in the Isles of Scilly, in a storm on December 14, 1907, killing all but two of its eighteen member crew. Its cargo of 58,000 barrels of light paraffin oil caused perhaps the first large marine oil spill.******

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