Title: The Story of Shep: Written by His Mistress
Author: Bertha Jaques - Bertha Evelyn Jaques was an American etcher and cyanotype photographer. Jaques helped found the Chicago Society of Etchers, an organization that would become internationally significant for promoting etching as a popular printmaking technique. She is best known for her hand-colored botanical prints and scenes from her foreign and domestic travels.

Throughout her career as a printmaker she continued to write poems, her first creative outlet. She combined these passions in Christmas cards and self-published books of poems. Her personality comes through most clearly in her poems, where her strong-will, wit, and practicality are evident. Her images of botanically accurate plants and uncommon scenes of the alleys, docks, and markets of foreign cities demonstrate her significance among artists of the early 20th century.

Jaques kept precise records of her experiments with printing throughout her career. As one of the early etchers during the American resurgence of the medium her process demonstrates an artist exploring the medium to its fullest. Perhaps more than other artists, it is worthwhile to study the different states of each image she produced. Each state represents the artist’s advancement in composition or technical prowess at a time when Jaques was among the first to rediscover such techniques.

Her choice of subject included botanical prints and landscapes. Both were typical for female artists of the time who had limited or no access to the subjects of their male counterparts. Jaques, however, approached both subjects atypically. Her botanical prints are scientifically precise and removed from context or background. Her landscapes have a focus on urban, industrial settings. Docks, coal barges, foreign markets, narrow alleys, and backyards are not common subjects for female artists to depict in such cities as Chicago, Cairo, Venice, and London. Jaques, however, showed the working areas of a city in a picturesque way that is just as captivating as her images of tourist-friendly scenes.

Her works are in private collections and sold occasionally through auction. The world’s largest public collection of the work of Bertha Jaques is owned by the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art. The museum owns more than 400 unique prints in addition to multiple states of many images. In honor of her 150th birthday, the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art is presenting a year-long retrospective of her work in 2013. (Information courtesy of Wikipedia)

Publisher: Self-Published
City: Chicago
Year: 1912
Printing Information: Signed Edition
Binding Style: Hardcover
Pagination: 105 pages
Width: 5.25" Height: 8.5"
Book Details: "This is an appreciation of a noble dog that I knew intimately for over ten years. Incidentally, it reflects a kindly light on all good dogs, for they are so much alike. It is a simple story, for Shep's life was uneventful. He never performed any heroic feat no accomplished marvelous things, but he loved his master and mistress with an unfaltering devotion. For this and his many admirable qualities, it has been a work of love to record these facts and dedicate the tribute to Shep's Master."
Condition / Notes: This is a scarce author-signed limited first edition of this memoir. The inscription on the front flyleaf reads "To the Goble family -- / including the dog -- / Bertha Jaques / February 1924." This is copy number 255 of 1,000.

This antique volume is bound in quarter white cloth and gray paper-covered boards. Black lettering appears on the spine. A printed paper label appears on the front cover. The book shows very light shelfwear. The binding is firm. The pages are clean and without markings. The work is illustrated with photographic plates, including a frontispiece showing the author and her d

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