were entitled History of the Oregon Country and were printed in 1924 by the Riverside Press, Cambridge, in what was called The Pioneer's Edition of 500 sets, at $25 a set. They are now sometimes priced by second-hand dealers at $50 a set, and can seldom be found at all, indicating that they have been treasured and kept in the households where they were bought. Without heavy subsidy, they could not have cost less, in consideration of all the work that went into them, but they were too expensive to be the friendly occupants of ordinary family book shelves.
An availability restricted to limited editions is obviously not the best way to keep a literary reputation alive. It is a helpful condition for a first issue of Moby Dick to be worth a thousand dollars, as long as any interested reader can pick up a satisfactory copy for a dollar, but if only the former existed Herman Melville would soon recede to the sentence or paragraph he used to occupy in American literature texts.
The five other separate publications by Harvey W. Scott, two pamphlets and three books, have not been of a nature easily to reach the public or to gain its eager attention.
In 1890 he edited and partly wrote History of Portland, a 651-page book of large format, with 72 laudatory biographical sketches, which was printed by F. W. Baltes and Company of Portland, but which was put out as a subscription enterprise by D. Mason & Company of Syracuse, New York, who appeared on the title page as publishers. He told of his part in it with protective candor and acknowledged the assistance of three helpers in the preface:
