Gambling Memorabilia Featuring the Collection of Tom Blue

[Crime—New York City] Mackeever, Samuel A. Glimpses of Gotham and City Characters by Samuel A. Mackeever, the American Charles Dickens. New York: Richard K. Fox, (1880). Third edition, “with new and spicy illustrations.” Original pictorial wraps. Fourteen plates, two full-page pictorial ads; rear wrapper depicting the façade of Fox’s Police Gazette building. 8vo. 72pp. Losses to backstrip at ends, corners chipped, contemporary ink sig. and but clean internally and stable. Rare. In this third edition, the publisher adds “spicy” illustrations of New York night life, particularly its siren women, who are depicted as prostitutes, pickpockets, and otherwise ill-intentioned charmers. One of the anecdotes describes private gambling rooms in saloons (pp. 19—21). The operator of one of the rooms tells his inquiring friend, who wonders where he has derived his riches, “Fortune seems to smile on me…I am tolerably sure of her graciousness when I have the deal.”