It has been a bit since I've bought an old math notebook ("copy book"), but this one was impossible to leave behind, with gorgeous hand-marbled covers and watercolored headers on pretty much every single every page, plus a few extras about the John Ranck of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania who kept it while studying at "Pattons School House", 1841-1842. This one spans the basics-- addition and subtraction, multiplication and division, etc. with lots of focus on measures of difference sorts (land, cloth, time, liquid, etc.) At the very end a few pages of handwritten copy, half a page repeating the phrasing "A bird in hand is worth two in the bush", and samples for types of notes relating to borrowing and lending money. Also stuck into the notebook: a list of Electors, a hand-written list of the 24 states as of 1842 with lovely flourishes, and a page of "Judgment notes" including the following: "I am constrained to plant a grove / for the fair maid that I love / of nineteen trees in nine strait rows / Nine in each row I must place / Or I will never see her face." Altogether quite a delight.
12 1/8 x 7 5/8”. 46 pp filled front and back. One section of pages (lined rather than unlined so I believe never bound in the notebook) are loose from the rest but still held together with string binding as a section. Overall good condition, with wear to exterior spine, water stains on just the first couple of pages and back interior cover, and some lightness to ink, scattered. Watercolor throughout is beautifully bright and saturated, just gorgeous.
