The Book Shed

Much shelf wear to the book and more to the price-clipped jacket which is tape repaired on the front panel. Inscribed by "Madeliene." Madeleine B. Stern was one of the great 20th century booksellers along with her business partner Leona Rostenberg. She was also on prolific author on diverse subjects from American history and the fields of literature and biography. First printing, no others noted. This biography of the dynamic reformer examines those social laws and that still-unembodied new age. It reanimates a heretofore neglected American reformer and casts new light upon previously unexplored bypaths of nineteenth-century American social history. The biography is fully documented, based in part upon a corpus of unpublished material in the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. Stephen Pearl Andrews supported free love and the rights of women, dramatized by his journalistic debate with Horace Greeley and Henry James, Sr., and by his endorsement of Victoria Woodhull as the first woman candidate for the Presidency of the United States. These interests provide insight into some of the more colorful aspects of nineteenth-century American reform movements. Andrews’s attacks upon whatever infringed on individual freedom brought him into diverse arenas—economic, sociological, and philosophical. The philosophical system he developed included among its tenets the sovereignty of the individual, a science of society, a universal language (his Alwato long preceded Esperanto), the unity of the sciences, and a “Pantarchal United States of the World.” Pantarchy "proposes a NEW SPIRITUAL GOVERNMENT FOR THE WORLD, called THE PANTARCHY, which includes a NEW CHURCH and a NEW STATE, with, to use Andrews own language, " all other subordinate institutions, educational, informational, &c., which are universal in their scope and nature, and which can be devised and established as subservient to the collective wants of mankind." Books and other items ship promptly with a tracking number and (generally over $15.00) jacket protectors if applicable. Clean recycled packing material will be used when possible. The Book Shed has a been a member of the Vermont Antiquarian Bookseller's Association since 1997.