'The Story of Malta' by Maturin M. Ballou, printed and published by Boston and New York Houghton, Mifflin & Company, The Riverside Press Cambridge, 1900.
The volume is three quarter bound in blue calf leather with blue cloth boards. Top page edge gilt. Five raised bands to the spine with gilt stamped title and decoration. There is some fading to the spine leather and some shelf wear to the lower extremities but the volume generally remains in a very good condition externally.
Internally the volume has marbled endpapers with the bookplate of Herbert G. Squiers to the front pastedown. Herbert Goldsmith Squiers (1859-1911) was a United States diplomat and soldier, serving as Minister to Cuba and Panama and Second Lieutenant in the US army. Squiers was a man of some controversy having left Bejing in 1901 following the Chinese Boxer Uprising of 1900 with several railway carriages filled with Chinese art; it was said at the time (and continues to be reported as late as 2003) that the art was loot stolen from palaces in Peking. Squiers' controversial collection remains in the United States to this day and can be viewed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.