Condition: Good. Packed in a RIGID mailer with cardboard backing and padding. (See Photos)! Pages: not written on, clean, bright, odor free, bumping and creases to bottom corner of pages. Cover: clean, bright, bumping and rubbing to edges, creases to front and back bottom corners. Ships from California. Ships same or next day (weekdays and Saturdays)! ABOUT THIS: If New Jerseyan Abbot Kinney had not been born with asthma, Venice, California, would never have been built. In 1850 there were few treatments for this condition so when government lawyer Franklin Kinney and his Virginia socialite wife, Mary Cogswell, realized tiny red-haired Abbot had a problem, little could be done to help him. He was a brilliant child, so much so that he alone of all the siblings was sent abroad for education, after a sojourn at Columbia University. The University of Heidelberg, the Sorbonne in Paris, and various schools in Switzerland honed and broadened his intellectual curiosity_ Abbot interested himself in science, writing, botany, and especially languages. When he finally returned to the States, he spoke seven foreign tongues. President Ulysses S. Grant hired him to translate a Civil War history written in French. In his mid-20s, he formed a partnership with his brother Francis, in Kinney Brothers Tobacco Company, a tremendously profitable venture. Because of his celerity with languages, he was the self-appointed foreign buyer. Some of his tobacco buying trips spanned three years and he resided more in the east than he did in the land of his birth. He returned from one such long foray in 1880, when his ship docked in San Francisco. Foremost on his mind was training southeast to Florida and a fashionable health spa, to find relief for his debilitating asthma. Mother Nature, in all of her measureless wisdom, placed a cumbersome snowfall in the High Sierra Mountains just prior to Kinney's departure, and he was persuaded by acquaintances to journey south instead, to Southern California.