On March 30-31, 2012, as part of our bicentennial programming, AAS hosted a symposium titled “Research Libraries in the Digital Age: Needs and Opportunities.” This symposium was intended to provide the AAS Council and staff with a set of perspectives that would help inform its vision of how AAS can best position itself to remain [...]
The 200th annual meeting provided the opportunity to celebrate many accomplishments and transitions, but among the most poignant were the retirements of three long-time colleagues: Gigi Barnhill and Caroline Sloat (who retired this summer) and John Keenum (who will retire at the end of the year). A blog post about Gigi’s retirement will appear in [...]
About two years ago, I found myself looking at an 1892 Bibliobroadsheet. It advertised the Bronson, Michigan, store of J. Francis Ruggles, the most unusual bibliopole ever working in Bronson, for sure. Michael Winship, professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin and an editor of the recently published five-volume series A History [...]
The record-breaking price for a double elephant folio edition of John James Audubon’s Birds of America in London on December 9, 2010, prompts the question: Does the Society own a copy. The short answer is no — not the double elephant folio edition — but the story is more interesting than that. Indeed, AAS came [...]
This Tuesday, November 16, at 7:30 p.m., John B. Hench will be presenting the twenty-seventh Annual James Russell Wiggins Lecture in the Program in the History of the Book in American Culture at the American Antiquarian Society. John B. Hench is the retired vice president for collections and programs at AAS. His talk, “Random Notes [...]
What do we think about when we think about the history of the book in the U.S. South (for those of us prone to think about such things, that is)? It is received wisdom that the South was much less industrialized than the North in the first half of the nineteenth century. And, if print [...]
Schoolmarm, 1870
