The North American Sylva; or, a description of the Forest Trees of the United States, Canada and Nova Scotia. Philadelphia: Wm. Rutter & Co., 1871.
5 volumes. 8vo (264 x 170 mm). Steel-engraved portrait frontispiece, 277 hand-colored engraved or lithographed plates, after Bessa, Redoute and others. Period brown half morocco over marbled paper-covered boards, spines tooled in blind and lettered in gilt, glazed endpapers, edges gilt. Titles toned, coloring of plate 61 in vol II smudged, plates 5 and 10 in vol I with coloring very slightly smudged, stain to inner blank margin of plate 17 in vol I, binding with some scuffing to extremities, lower cover of vol II with small area of marbled paper abraded, oxidizing to endpapers.
Provenance: Withrow family (ink stamp on front pastedowns, by descent); Bonnie Evans [nee Withrow] and Lynden Evans (bookplate).

EXCELLENT SET OF A LATE EDITION OF THIS CLASSIC AMERICAN NATURAL HISTORY. "Few American color plate books had such lasting popularity as this classic work on American trees, or as tangled a publication history ... In 1856 a fire destroyed the premises of the publisher of the joint edition. The Michaux plates were saved, but the Nuttall stones were evidently lost, and the later joint editions used new stones" (Reese Stamped with a National Character 21).