Heading: (Louisiana - Judaica)
Author: Levy, Banjamin
Title: New-Orleans WholeSale Prices Current, 2 issues with attached manuscript letters
Place Published: New Orleans
Publisher:Benjamin Levy
Date Published: 1836
Description: 2 issues each 2 printed pages + attached Autograph Letters Signed with stampless address leaves. Feb. 27, 1836 and December 3, 1836. Letters comprise:
From Brander McKenna & Knight, New Orleans to Abram Bell, New York.
From Francis A. Boyle, New Orleans to T.W. Vaughan, Greensburg, Kentucky.
Also includes: Korn, Bertram Wallace. Benjamin Levy, New Orleans Printer and Publisher, With a Bibliography of Benjamin Levy Imprints, 1817-1841. Portland, Maine: 1961. 78pp. One of 300 copies.
Both issues of the printed newsletter detail the trade for cotton, tobacco, sugar, whiskey, and other commodities, from beaver fur and gunpowder to champagne. The handwritten letters concern the cotton and tobacco markets. Rare imprints by Levy, called by his biographer Bertram Korn, “the first important Jewish Printer-Publisher, not only in the South, but probably in the entire country.“ Copies of Levy‘s Price Current are scarce, WorldCat shows scattered holdings in only a few institutions. Born in New York, Levy began his professional life as a bookbinder, moving to New Orleans as a young man in 1811, becoming the third Jewish resident of the city and launching a burgeoning business as stationer, bookseller, bookbinder, printer and commercial publisher of more than 100 legal treatises and compendiums, city directories and almanacs - and this weekly Price Current, which he both published and sometimes edited from 1822 until 1839, at the start of the first full-fledged American Depression, which ended with his bankruptcy.

Mild soil and wear, ownership marks; second letter heavily worn, separated at folds, tape repaired; first letter good overall.