The Young American's Magazine of Self-Improvement. Combining Literary Entertainment and Instruction with an Effort to promote the Union of thorough Self-Improvement with every Department of Industry. First Volume [all published]

Boston: Charles H. Peirce, 1847. First Edition. 12mo (19cm). Publisher's brown decoratively embossed cloth boards, lettered in gilt on spine; portrait frontispiece (Benjamin Franklin); 364 + 4pp ads. Mild external wear, with spot of exposure to bottom fore-corner of front board; still a tight, Very Good or better copy, with contents fresh and unmarked. Postscript note pasted-in at end of Introduction states: "After the arrangements above alluded to were made for the continuance of this Magazine, ill health, long protracted, on the part of the editor, prevented its further issue. This volume, therefore, contains all the numbers published." Entire run (comprising (truncated) six bi-monthly issues) of this short-lived magazine of moral hygiene, instruction, and literature, aimed at adolescent boys and young men. The content is generally progressive, with contributors such as Wendell Phillips, Lyman Beecher, George Tuckerman, William Ellery Channing, etc. well represented. The editor, George Washington Light (1809-1868) was a Boston poet, publisher and bookseller and a prominent broker of temperance and abolitionist periodicals. Not noted by Mott (American Magazines). (Inventory #: 51579)