Riis, Jacob A., Children of the Tenements (1903)

Description

Riis, Jacob A., Children of the Tenements. (MacMillan: New York, 1903)

Octavo. 387 plus 2 pages of advertisements. Bound in green publishers cloth, English case bound. with  title, author, and publisher gilt stamped on spine with single horizontal rule gilt stamped at top, bottom and between title and author. Set up, electrotyped and publisher October, 1903. Printed by the Norwood Press, Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

Corners bumped. Damp wrinkling to bottom of first hundred pages. Slight lean to spine. Sewing is weakening around page 150. Christmas 1903 ownership inscription for George Fowler. Otherwise bright and clean.

Riis’s most famous book was How the Other Half Lives (1890), this adds to it with stories, based on fact, of children living in the tenements of New York.

“^{Jacob August Riis (May 3, 1849 – May 26, 1914) was a Danish-American social reformer, “muckraking” journalist and social documentary photographer. He is known for using his photographic and journalistic talents to help the impoverished in New York City; those impoverished New Yorkers were the subject of most of his prolific writings and photography. He endorsed the implementation of “model tenements” in New York with the help of humanitarian Lawrence Veiller. Additionally, as one of the most famous proponents of the newly practicable casual photography, he is considered one of the fathers of photography due to his very early adoption of flash in photography. While living in New York, Riis experienced poverty and became a police reporter writing about the quality of life in the slums. He attempted to alleviate the bad living conditions of poor people by exposing their living conditions to the middle and upper classes.” – Wikipedia}