NOTIONS OF THE AMERICANS by JAMES FENIMORE COOPER. Two Volume Set. LONDON: Henry Colburn, 1828. First English Edition (following the first American edition published the same year).

A SIGNED MANUSCRIPT LETTER by his DAUGHTER, SUSAN FENIMORE COOPER, is tipped-in. A single page handwritten letter, written from "Riverside Cottage", addressed to "Mrs. Foot" and ending with"good wishes" for "Miss Stone". The letter is tipped on to a blank prelim of Volume I

Two Volumes, 3/4 leather and paper covered boards, marbled page edges (page edges of the closed book), 5.5x8 inches. Pagination: Volume I: xxiv, 459 pp. Volume II: xii,477 pp.

GOOD CONDITION: Spines professionally rebacked and inner hinges professionally reinforced making these complete, solid, very presentable copies. The original front and rear paper covered boards are scraped, shelf rubbed, and worn along the edges. Internally, there is foxing mostly on the first and last few pages of each volume then only a bit here and there. There is a lovely armorial bookplate of GEORGE MERRYWEATHER on the front pastedown of each volume.

RARE and UNIQUE with the handwritten letter by SUSAN FENIMORE COOPER, and the interesting provenance.

About SUSAN FENIMORE COOPER (from Wikipedia and other Internet sources):

******Susan Augusta Fenimore Cooper, b.1813 d.1894, was an American writer and amateur naturalist. She was the daughter of writer James Fenimore Cooper. Much of her life was devoted to her father and his writing. She often travelled with him and assisted in documenting and organizing his notes. Later in his life she served as his secretary and amanuensis. In addition she was a noted writer, naturist and suffragist.

Cooper published on diverse subjects, but she is best remembered as a nature writer. Her second book, Rural Hours (1850), published anonymously "By a Lady" offered a sharp eyed account of rural life in New York.

In 1855 Susan Fenimore Cooper and her sister, both unmarried and childless, built a home mainly with bricks and materials from the burnt ruins of Otsego Hall in Cooperstown, which her paternal grandfather had built and where her father and mother had lived. They named it "RIVERSIDE COTTAGE" and the sisters became known as "The Cottage Sisters." Riverside Cottage was later renamed Byberry Cottage.

Many of the houses on River Street were haunted with "uncanny things seen and heard". But, perhaps the most striking occurrence took place in 1894: Susan's ghost - complete in her ghostly wheelchair - was said to have taken itself out of the cottage and rattled across the street to the church where the whole town witnessed her going down the aisle in the middle of the Good Friday Service and then straight through the altar before vanishing altogether.******

About GEORGE MERRYWEATHER (from Wikipedia):

******George Merryweather was a British doctor and inventor.

His best known invention was the Tempest Prognosticator, a weather predicting device also called The Leech Barometer. It consists of twelve glass bottles containing leeches, which, when disturbed by the atmospheric conditions preceding a storm, climb upwards, triggering a small whalebone hammer which rings a bell. Merryweather said the more leeches that climbed, and the more the bell was rung, the greater the likelihood of a storm. He explained that the twelve bottles were placed in a circle in order that his "little comrades" might see one another and "not endure the affliction of solitary confinement".

The invention had great success and caused a sensation when it was put on show at the Great Exhibition of 1851. At this time he was an honorary curator of Whitby Literary and Philosophical Society. His device remains on permanent exhibition there.******