"The First Mortgage" by E. U. Cook, 1898 Doré-Illustrated Victorian Verse Bible

The Piece

The best-titled book ever to sit in an antiques shop: The First Mortgage, Chicago, 1898 — a retelling of the entire Bible in rhymed Victorian verse, built on the era's favorite metaphor. The "first mortgage" is the debt contracted in Eden; the whole of Scripture, in Cook's telling, is the story of how it was paid. Gilded-Age America understood salvation and finance in the same breath, and no object captures that quirk of the age more perfectly.

The book earns its shelf space twice over: it is illustrated throughout with the brooding engravings of Gustave Doré — Joshua commanding the sun to stand still, the fiery furnace, the Ascension — the most famous Bible images of the nineteenth century, here in a working family edition. The green cloth cover carries elaborate silver stamping, worn to a ghostly shimmer; the frontispiece bears the author's portrait over a printed facsimile signature.

Best of all, the endpaper holds its provenance in pencil and ink: period owners' names — Myrtie and Effie Mullen among them, one dated April 1898, the very year of publication — and a later hand, Kathe Schwommle. Three readers, named, across the book's first life.

History

E. U. Cook's verse Bible belongs to a booming Gilded-Age genre: Scripture repackaged for the parlor table, sold by subscription and door-to-door across the Midwest. His Chicago publisher, Rhodes & McClure, specialized in exactly this trade, and The First Mortgage proved popular enough to be reprinted into the 1900s. The masterstroke was borrowing Doré: the French artist's monumental Bible engravings of 1866 had become the shared visual imagination of Christianity itself, and American publishers reproduced them endlessly — meaning a farm family in 1898 could own images first made for luxury European folios.

The debt-and-redemption framing was no accident either. In the decade of farm mortgages, silver crusades, and William Jennings Bryan, no metaphor hit an American reader harder than a mortgage on the soul — paid in full at the end.

Product Details

Why It Belongs In Your Home

Some books are bought to read; this one is bought to open in company. The title alone starts the conversation — every homeowner in the room will laugh before you explain — and then the Doré plates and the 1898 schoolgirl signatures finish it. Stacked on a console, faced-out on a shelf, or gifted to your favorite realtor, mortgage broker, or new homeowner, it is a $25 object that tells a story about faith, debt, and the American 1890s that no reproduction ever could.