On Tuesday evening, March 29, 2011, at 6pm, the American Antiquarian Society will hold its fourth annual Adopt-A-Book event in Worcester. At this event you will see recently acquired books, pamphlets, newspapers, prints and ephemera that have been added to the collection by the Society’s curators over the past year. You can also enjoy drinks and hors d’oeuvres, all included in the $20 entrance fee, while listening to the curators talk about their finds. We hope you will want to “adopt” an object by making a contribution to help the library take in other waifs and strays in the future. In return AAS will permanently record the adopter’s name(s) on a special bookplate attached to each item, and in the AAS online library catalog.
As with previous years, we have prepared an illustrated online catalog of the 176 items up for adoption this year. Have a look! If you see an orphan that appeals to you, you can even adopt now, in case you can’t make it to the event at the end of the month. Just follow the “How to Adopt” directions on the side bar of the catalog and contact our Curator of Books (and Chief of Adoptions) David Whitesell with your adoption requests. Be assured, you don’t have to be a Daddy Warbucks or Angelina Jolie, either – we have objects available for adoption for as little as $10! That said, if Ms. Jolie reads our blog and would like to adopt, of course we would be more than happy to help her make a selection.
At the event on March 29th, AAS curators will give a brief overview of objects they have purchased with resources raised at last year’s Adopt-a-Book fundraiser. All of this year’s adoptees will be displayed in the reading room and the AAS staff will be available for questions and conversation. In addition, AAS-National Endowment for the Humanities fellow Lisa Wilson, Professor of American History at Connecticut College, will discuss her ongoing research on American step-children and step-families. As an added incentive to come out to the event, we will have some “too-new-to-make-the-catalog” adoptees, fresh from the acquisition table and only available for adoption that night.
For the next couple of weeks we are going to use the blog as a way to highlight different objects in the Adopt-a-Book catalog. You will see examples from each department including manuscripts, books, children’s literature, newspapers & periodicals and graphic arts. Hopefully, all these postings will help raise funds for the Society’s future acquisitions by matching up material with potential adopters. So mark your calendars for March 29th and we look forward to seeing you under the dome!
