This past April, the state of Massachusetts marked the 235th anniversary of the famous ride of Paul Revere and the start of the American Revolution at the Battles of Lexington & Concord. As you might expect, AAS takes Patriot’s Day (April 19th) seriously. Like most Massachusetts residents, we have the day off (it is a [...]
The quagga illustrated in this children’s book caught my eye because, possibly like you, dear reader, I had never heard of this animal. And so I went to Wikipedia where I read an interesting article about the quagga’s relationship to the plains zebra and about efforts to breed them back into existence. Curator of Children’s [...]
Next year marks the 150th anniversary of the start of the American Civil War. Many institutions are planning exhibitions, activities, and publications around the events which tore the United States apart between 1861 and 1865. Some organizations have already contacted AAS regarding the possibility of borrowing or reproducing material from our collections. The uptick in [...]
The ongoing processing of the Society’s Group Photograph collection has recently turned up a small cache of nineteenth-century photographs of librarians. Oh sure, there are also significant photographs of mill workers, school children, and important businessmen, but around here we get pretty jazzed up over images of librarians. On the whole, librarians tend to be [...]
Recently, the American Antiquarian Society digitized a new finding aid to help scholars access the Society’s Group Photograph collection (http://www.americanantiquarian.org/groupphotos.htm). Usually, we like these finding aides to be as complete as possible, with detailed entries and scans — you know, the whole works, like we have done for our collections of daguerreotypes, ambrotypes and tintypes. [...]
This was the question I got recently as I was sorting through some photographic material at my desk and was putting carefully aside a small, round photograph of two children. As you might already know, the American Antiquarian Society has important holdings of early photography, including daguerreotypes from the 1830s and cabinet photographs of performers [...]
March 1, 2010 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of the pianist composer Frédéric François Chopin (1810-1849). Chopin was born near Warsaw and lived much of his short life in France so you may be asking yourself why on earth there is a post about him on the blog of the American Antiquarian Society. [...]
In the cold of a New England winter, it is easy to feel sorry for one’s self as the grey clouds of January barely dissipate in the low light of February’s early gloam. Some believe that the best way to tackle winter is to embrace it, and so the Graphic Arts department offers for your [...]
Dogs. Some people love them, others hate them. Regardless, there is just no getting around the fact that the lives of humans and dogs have long been intertwined. Depictions of dogs were painted on cave walls by early man and just last week images of “First Dog” Bo (the Obama’s Portuguese water dog) playing in [...]
In 2010, the Graphic Arts department will be evaluating and re-housing its collection of nineteenth-century valentines. We have over 3,000 of these lacy, be-flowered paper objects and they are being sorted to provide better access for readers. Due to the high number and complexity of each object (some have moving parts, accompanying envelopes, etc., while [...]
Henry Box Brown (b. 1816) escaped lifelong slavery in Virginia by shipping himself in a box (with the help of white and African-American abolitionists) to Philadelphia in 1849. One of the few primary sources detailing his breathtaking escape to freedom is the children’s book Cousin Ann’s Stories for Children. Written in 1849 by Quaker abolitionist [...]
Just in time for your winter viewing pleasure (who needs football?), the Graphic Arts team is pleased to announce that an inventory of the European Political Print Collection is now on-line and is fully illustrated. Have a look: http://www.americanantiquarian.org/Inventories/Europeanprints/ This is the latest work by our Graphic Arts Assistant Jaclyn Penny, who inventoried, described, re-foldered, [...]
With the pending release of Apple Computers’ tablet computer and the surrounding press and discussion, it seemed like a good time to review the precursor to it all, the humble school slate. The Antiquarian Society has several nineteenth-century slates in the games collection, including one with multiple pages, patented in 1867 and bound like a [...]
Recently the Graphic Arts staff at the American Antiquarian Society posted its latest illustrated inventory, a complete listing of political and social engraved satires from the Charles Peirce collection (yes, that last name is spelled correctly! Peirce, not Pierce!). You can have a look by following this link http://www.americanantiquarian.org/Inventories/Peirce/ Like many collections here at the [...]
Last Friday we posted an entry about bookmarks describing the variety of scraps and ephemeral objects used by eighteenth and nineteenth century readers to mark their places in their books. As that blog post was being edited, yet another bookmark was discovered, and a most curious one at that. A small letter was found tucked [...]
If you were lucky enough to be the recipient of multiple books this holiday season, all of which beg to be read immediately, you may be in need of a crucial tool . . . the humble bookmark! At the Antiquarian Society, as books are catalogued they are checked over carefully by our staff and [...]
AAS’s The Children’s Friend: A New Year’s Present is one of just two known copies of the 1821 pamphlet. Fifteen centimeters tall and eight pages deep, the paper-covered volume stood little chance of survival in the hands of generations of American children. But there was one family fastidious enough for the task, and by chance [...]
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