Book cover: "Big Freeze"

Much of the United States has been suffering through a big freeze in recent days, but it's already 80 here in the Sonoran Desert. We have gnats and dust.

• Title: Big Freeze
• Author: Bellamy Partridge (1877-1960). I was absolutely positive that I'd featured him on Papergreat before, most likely for his 1958 book on the history of auctions, Going, Going, Gone! But I was wrong. Huh.
• Dust jacket illustrator: Paul Galdone (1907-1986)
• Book design: Maurice Serle Kaplan
• Publisher: Thomas Y. Cromwell Company
• Publication date: 1948
• Pages: 236
• Format: Hardcover
• Dust jacket price: $2.75 (the equivalent of about $38 today)
• Dust jacket expert: "Bellamy Partridge's new historical novel tells a dramatic story of old New York, when the city was a small but cocky town of a mere quarter million. It was in 1832 that David Wakeman, a young engineer just out of college, passed through the city when hordes of people fleeing the cholera scourge were streaming to the country. On his way to Philadelphia — to take a job on the new aqueduct — David was appalled at the sight of the panicky fugitives, for he was convinced, as many were not, that it was the medieval system of wells which so many cities still used for their water supply that was spreading the deadly infection. When, in time, New York came round to his way of thinking, David was called back to carry to completion the work on the Croton reservoir and aqueduct."
• Dedication: "This book is dedicated to HELEN my researcher and collaborator, my wife, and still my friend"
• Excerpt from "A Word to the Reader": "In writing this novel I have had access to the century-old collection of books, manuscripts, records, documents, and diaries belonging to the American Institute. Back in the days when New York was a small town — small in the sense of having none of the utilities and modern conveniences which make city life worth the living — the Institute was a great power for progress and improvement, and for a way of life it called The American Plan. Among the ambitious aims of the Institute was a determination to get an adequate water system into New York City; for even after the population of the place had passed a quarter of a million, New Yorkers were still pumping water from their own wells and cisterns. The only plumbing they possessed was in the back yards. Almost inevitably there was a big water fight which lasted for years; but the library of the Institute was, so far as I know, the only organization which compiled a fairly complete record of these hostilities."
• About the protagonist: Of David Wakeman, Partridge writes: "The plot ... concerns the love affairs of an imaginary young engineer I have called David Wakeman. That I have ascribed to David a large part of the credit and responsibility for building the Aqueduct was a matter of necessity as well as convenience."
• Excerpt from 1948 review by Charles Lee in The New York Times: "The plumbers will hail Mr. Partridge for serving, in a sense, as their laureate in this oblique tribute to their essential place in modern society. Aqueducteers ought to drink his health in the vital liquid of their profession. And readers with a touch of old-fashioned conscience and a taste for somewhat lavendered narrative and poeticized justice will give him their huzzahs. This reader must put it on the record, however, and with full appreciation of the story's simple charms, that 'Big Freeze' is not top-shelf Partridge. Some interesting historical footnotes are worked into the text, but the story is thin and slow, and the characterization trite."
• Related reading: An in-depth November 2019 Smithsonian Magazine article by Jonathan Schifman is headlined "How New York City Found Clean Water." It details the long process that led to the building of the Croton Aqueduct. It fears Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, among many other figures, and covers some of the same ground as Partridge's novel.