Bible Characters, Instructive and Entertaining Compiled for the use of Young Children (3rded) on a sheet with History of Haman and Mordecai compiled by a Friend to Youth. New York: Mahlon Day, 1837. This single sheet printing shows the way in which multiple-page books were laid out (or composed) during the nineteenth century. Such sheets [...]
Did you receive your copy of the Almanac yet? If not, a PDF version is currently available on the AAS website. But that’s not what this post is about. This is not a post about digital surrogacy. It’s a post about good, old-fashioned printing presses (okay, okay, a 1995 press). While we undoubtedly advocate for [...]
Today, poetry occupies one of the smallest possible corners of the publishing landscape. The market for books of poetry by contemporary poets is miniscule, and—apart from occasionally having one of the poems in, say, the New Yorker catch one’s eye—many readers can go months (if not years) without seeing a contemporary poem in print. This [...]
The fifth annual Adopt-A-Book event will be held on Tuesday, April 3, at 6 p.m. Browse the 2012 Adopt-A-Book Catalog to view the 150 items up for adoption. Here are a few highlights still available for adoption from the Graphic Arts collections. 77. BIGGER IS BETTER! Adopt me for $250 A Mammoth newspaper! 10 Copies [...]
Augustus Chatterton, Esq. World traveler, wit, and author of a late eighteenth-century book of poems, Buds of Beauty; or, Parnassian Sprig. The only problem is that no one knows who the man is. After Chatterton authored the 1787 work, which contains such picks as “The Printer and Plagiarist,” “The Segar,” and “Epitaph on a Mean [...]
Bidwell, George, d. 1885. Treatise on the imposition of forms … also, tables of signatures, etc., useful to compositors, pressmen, and publishers. New York: Raymond & Caulon, 1865. Rare first edition of one of the few dedicated handbooks for printers on “imposition,” that is, the arrangement of text pages in the “forme” placed on the [...]
Did you know that a patriot printer named Isaiah Thomas founded the American Antiquarian Society in 1812? Did you know that the terms uppercase, lowercase, and stereotype originated from terms used in relation to early printing presses? Did you know that early printers needed to read backwards and upside down? Do you know why the [...]
Schoolmarm, 1870
