[TRICK CYCLISTS] ALDENS, The (Charles and Richard). SCRAPBOOKS OF THE ALDENS, TRICK CYCLISTS. Two matching color-covered folio-size albums filled with contracts, playbills, photographs, clippings, menus, printed cards and invitations, programs (including some printed on silk), business cards, membership certificates, broadsides, ALSs and other memorabilia related to the career of the two-man team billed as The Alden Brothers, a vaudeville act. Among the included ephemera are many images of early high-wheel bicycles, including perhaps most prominently dozens of letterpress broadsides bearing central wood-engraved images of the duo presenting the feat of one cyclist standing on the seat of the other’s penny farthing, while the lowermost rider pedals forward. The Aldens share bills with a host of variety artists, including Morritt, Trewey, Dan Leno, and Little Tich, as well as quick change artists, acrobats, comics, and a host of other lesser-known variety acts. Prominent is a full-color lithograph of one Alden brother working together with another trick cyclist, Fred Lester. Other notable contents include dime museum bills and associated memorabilia (Kohl & Middleton’s, Wonderland, and many other “museums”), including booking letters to the Aldens, an ALS from the ascensionist Achille Philion, a bill from Doris’s Museum with a “Fat Women’s Convention” topping the bill.
Other Alden-related material reveals that the brothers, in addition to presenting a trick cycling act, also worked as clowns, comics, swimming instructors, and as “living statuary”; a boudoir card in one album pictures the brothers made up as alabaster sculptures. Contents date from 1885 to 1893. Both albums disbound with considerable chipping and wear around the perimeters of the pages, but with the contents in generally good condition or better. A singular collection.