Best Christmas

Business has been none too good for the Eldredge Company Inc., poster printers of Brooklyn. N. Y., but Secretary Elwin Martin Eldredge, pink with pleasure, swore that never in his life had he had such a wonderful Christmas present as the one he received last week.

Secretary Eldredge's grandfather was a famed mariner of Brooklyn. After 20 years of collecting, Grandson Eldredge, who started as a schoolboy, has probably the finest collection of ship prints in the U. S. It is valued at approximately $150,000, contains over 1,000 items.

He has pictures of Atlantic liners, Nantucket whalers, Mississippi steamboats, British, French, Dutch ships of the line--but he also specializes. Pride of his portfolios is a special collection of every steamboat that ever plied the Long Island Sound. He has a model of the Isaac Newton, first steamer on the Hudson to have three tiers of staterooms. He has not one but several lithographs of the Atlantic, first Sound steamer to use illuminating gas. One thing he lacked: a picture of the Glen Cove, first Sound steamer to be equipped with a steam calliope for the entertainment of the passengers.

One evening several years ago he passed an antique store on 8th Avenue, and there in the window was a picture of the Glen Cove, smokestacks, calliope and all. When he next returned it was gone. As the years passed Elwin Martin Eldredge grew to feel that he never would find a picture of that steamer. Last week a friend from Boston sent him a Christmas present: a lithograph, faded but well preserved, of the Glen Cove. Collector Eldredge could not contain himself.

"Do you know," beamed he to reporters, "it's been over 12 years now. and I must have visited a dozen cities looking for it. It seems too good to be true."

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