Private Libraries in a Digital Age

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In an age of inter-connectivity, mobility, and Librarything.com that purports to bring us together in a digital utopia, whither will the truly personal library go? Do we risk having a network of Gatsbys present and past, interested in books more essential for their social value than their literary or historical merit? A social networking database ...

It doesn’t stop with “Antiquarian…” or, I’ll take what’s behind door number one!

Blog post 1 001

Assistant Curator of Manuscripts and Assistant Reference Library Tracey Kry comments on her impressions of AAS as a newly-arrived employee. A couple of months ago now, we had a post about creating an AAS Glossary that would talk about terms and collections unique to AAS (http://pastispresent.org/category/aas-glossary/ ).  The first post was about people’s confusion with the ...

Cataloger Uncovers Scandal: “It was Unrequited Love”

The Map of Portland, Oregon

Like the other catalogers here at AAS, part of my job as the Graphic Arts cataloger is to figure out the artists, sitters, publishers and others who contributed to the works in the collection. So when I catalogued a large color lithograph view of Portland, Oregon from 1891, I noticed that the copyright holders were ...

Call for Co-editors for an AAS Glossary

booksnake

The American Antiquarian Society is almost 200 years old. I guess that's not entirely shocking, given that "Antiquarian" is in our name, but sometimes it's easy to forget that when we were founded there were no functional steam-locomotives, no sewing machines, no modern matches.  Napoleon was still fighting his way across Europe.  Even "The Star-Spangled ...

The Answer, or what to do when Google doesn’t give it up easily

wayourpeoplelived

Ding, ding, ding... We have a winner! Our exercise in crowd-sourcing research questions was a success, and all the antiquarian glory goes to peterme for solving the reference mystery posed in our earlier post. The correct book our reader was looking for was (drum-roll please) “The Way Our People Lived: an Intimate American ...

The Question: See if YOU can solve this reference mystery

bookquestion

I was in a bookstore in the '80s and started reading a book about Puritans feeding their babies ale but now I can't remember the title. Can you help me find the book? This is the kind of question we live for at AAS: the test that can make or break you as a professional. ...

The Embezzler Redeemed – Part 3

brower_manhattan_company_bank_note

Continued from Part 2 of the Embezzler Redeemed One possible answer to this question is suggested by an account published in the November 19, 1803 issue of the Morning Chronicle. We understand that the Manhattan Company have discovered a further fraud of about eight thousand dollars, committed by Benjamin Brower, previous to his elopements. It is said ...

From Cheap-Jacks to Scrooge McDuck

In Cheap We Trust

Recent economic events have raised the profile of cheapness, which makes this Tuesday evening's free public lecture at AAS a particularly timely event.  On Tuesday, Nov. 17, at 7:30pm Lauren Weber will be discussing the value of thriftiness in American history in a talk titled: "From Cheap-Jacks to Scrooge McDuck: A Brief History of Cheapness and Thrift in America."  By ...

The Embezzler Redeemed- Part 2

brower_wall_street

Continued from Part 1 of "The Embezzler Redeemed" A report that Benjamin Brower had been apprehended at Albany was refuted almost immediately as being “wholly without foundation.”  But on October 25, 1803, the New England Palladium (Boston) briefly reported he had been captured.  On the 29th the New York Morning Chronicle expanded upon the news of ...

The Embezzler Redeemed- Part 1

brower_columbian_speaker_preface

One of the great joys of cataloging is figuring out who the folks were who wrote, edited, illustrated, printed, published, or owned the books that cross our desks.  In most cases we don’t have time to delve into the lives of these people, and wistfully think that someone ought to write a dissertation on this ...