[1ST ED] Elements of Sanitation (with La Guardia et al. signatures)

Public health textbook covering the science and technology of sanitation as it pertains to “the problems of sewage disposal and trade waste control, to refuse collection and disposal, to the problems of ventilation [and air conditioning], to the regulation of swimming pools, to miscellaneous issues involved in the control of the environment in general and to the increasingly important aspects of industrial hygiene.” Written by Edward Scott Hopkins with the collaboration of a cadre of experts including co-author Walter D. Binger. Published by D. Van Nostrand Company in 1939. Hardcover cloth boards with gilt lettering to spine only, 435 pages with b/w photographs and sketches. Signed and dated to the year of publication on the front free endpaper by Walter D. Binger, who was at the time the Commissioner of Borough Works for New York City under Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, and had previously been La Guardia’s First Deputy Commissioner of Sanitation for New York City. Binger directed the construction of both the Harlem River Drive and East River Drive and gained notoriety as a nemesis to Robert Moses, pushing back against a proposed Brooklyn-Battery Bridge, and enlisting Ely Jacques Kahn to design the Municipal Asphalt plant at 91st and York, a modernist building abhorred by Moses but deemed by MoMA one of the 47 best buildings constructed in America between 1932 and 1944. Also signed on the FFE “Given to Henry Hope Reed by Walter D Binger/1968” in Reed’s handwriting. Reed was a prominent classicist-leaning architectural historian and critic. With, additionally, a tipped in typed letter inside the back cover on the Mayor’s letterhead, dated November 16, 1939, thanking Binger for the gift of a (presumably different) copy of the book, signed by Fiorello La Guardia. Minor rippling to textblock. Some fraying to cloth. Light bumping and rubbing to extremities. Extensive references in the World Catalog point to the book’s significance in its day, though scarce in the first edition now, let alone with the combination of inscriptions, signatures, and letters associated with this copy.