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Rare Books

Mason & Dixon

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Description: "Charles Mason (1728-1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) were the British surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here is their story as reimagined by Thomas Pynchon, in an updated 18th-century novel feature Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political, and major caffeine abuse. Unreflectively entangled in crimes of demarcation, Mason and Dixon take us along on a grand tour of the Enlightenment's dark hemisphere, from their first journey together to the Cape of Good Hope, to pre-Revolutionary America and back to England, into the shadowy yet redemptive turns of their later lives, through incongruities in conscience, parallaxes of personality, tales of questionable altitude told and intimated by voices clamoring not to be lost. Along the way they encounter a plentiful cast of characters, including Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Samuel Johnson, as well as a Chinese feng shui master, a Swedish irredentist, a talking dog, and a robot duck. The quarrelsome, daring, mismatched pair--Mason as melancholy and Gothic as Dixon is cheerful and pre-Romantic--pursue a linear narrative or irregular lives, observing, and managing to participate in, the many occasions of madness presented them by the Age of Reason"--Dust jacket.
Type: Rare Books(Opens in new tab)
Publication date: 1997.
Call number: 657285
Creator: Pynchon, Thomas(Opens in new tab)
ISBN: 0805037586; 9780805037586
Provenance: Purchased from Orpheus Books via AbeBooks, November 2025.
Dimensions: 25 cm
Associated people: Jaramillo, Raquel,
Associated organization: Henry Holt and Company,
Find out more: View in the Library catalog(Opens in new tab)

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Wonder!: and other Dixon Erasers
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One box of three erasers entitled Wonder!: and Other Dixon Erasers, manufactured by the Joseph Dixon Crucible Company, Jersey City, New Jersey. The three different types of erasers in the box are: "Dixon Craft No. 892"; "Dixon Wonder Ink Eraser, No. 1140"; and "Dixon 'Poppy' No. 868." The box is covered with shimmery lavender-colored paper.
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The Dixon Manual for Artisans in Wood and Metal
Visual Materials
One art instruction book entitled The Dixon Manual for Artisans in Wood and Metal: Designs, Instructions, Operations and Processes, published by William Dixon Incorporated, Newark, New Jersey, copyright 1939. This 32-page portfolio consists of 21 leaves of projects, 10 leaves of textual instruction for the projects, and an unnumbered leaf of prefatory and introductory matter. As stated in the preface: "This new collection of projects has been designed to meet the constant demand of teachers and hobbyists for artistic designs combining wood and metal." Some of the projects included are: an ashtray, a coaster, a console table and mirror, a table lamp, shelf brackets and a cornice and radiator grill. All of the project sheets are signed (printed) "Designed by Karl Ufer". On the front cover is a small, nearly-square image of a man hand-tooling a metal cup. The back cover is blank, as are the insides of the front and back covers. Laid into this portfolio are 3 additional items: a typed notification of the opening of the William Dixon School of Metal Arts (New York), dated February 15, 1936, on William Dixon letterhead; a gift catalog from The Metal Crafts Shop in Providence, RI; and a single issue (Vol. 4, No. 3, March 1936) of the periodical The Metal Crafts: In and About Metal, published by the Metal Crafts Supply Company in Providence, RI. This issue is in a paper envelope addressed to Mabel Spofford.
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