Month: March 2021

The newest additions are two original mining supply catalogues. The first is an early 1910 edition of the Queen City Supply Company of Cincinnati, Ohio. This 1132 page catalogue includes supplies for railroads, mills, mines, quarries, machinists, lumbermen, foundries and blacksmiths. The Queen City Supply Company was organized in 1890 as the successor to the Post and Company supply departments which had been in existence for more than a quarter of a century. The catalogue offers early versions of Baldwin carbide lamps including wet mine lamps with and without the attachment on top for use with candlesticks. This is the only ad I’ve ever seen for the wet mine Baldwin with the candlestick attachment, an extremely rare lamp. The second catalogue is the General and Electrical Catalogue No. 99 for the venerable Denver firm of Hendrie & Bolthoff Manufacturing and Supply Company. Established in 1861, this company’s No. 99 Catalogue is dated 1924 and presents 1786 pages of machinery and equipment of all kinds including blasting supplies, mining lamps, ore cars, cages, and other mining supplies to name a few. I’ve scanned several pages from each catalogue of mining related items. Have fun checking them out.

I collect mining books so I thought I’d share selected image scans of some of my favorite obscure out-of-copyright titles covering mines, miners and their history. I recently acquired a rare first edition of The Black Hills Illustrated edited by George P. Baldwin. Originally published in 1904 by the Black Hills Mining Men’s Association, this large format book provides the most complete coverage of mining in the Black Hills at the turn of the century. Full of 206 pages of photos of mines, mining men, buildings, towns, and other area development, the book includes over 750 original photographs. All the area mining companies and their holdings are listed. An original first edition of the book in the Princeton University Library was scanned by google for the internet. Rather than scan several photos for my web site, I’ve included a link to that scan of the complete book for your enjoyment.