Many of you are familiar with our popular Adopt-A-Book fundraiser, an event that made it possible for our patrons to sponsor the acquisition of particular items in our collections—manuscripts, books, newspapers, children’s literature, or graphic arts materials such s photographs and ephemera. If you have donated in the past, thank you for your generosity!
Now it’s that time again, but this year’s fundraiser is a little different. We are calling it Fund-A-Book because rather than adopting a specific item, we are asking you for assistance with acquisitions across all of our collecting areas. This is our eleventh time sponsoring this acquisitions fundraiser, and it just so happens that eleven is a lucky number for some of us at the American Antiquarian Society—including our newly appointed eleventh head librarian!
We have chosen eleven representative items from the collection featuring our lucky number to inspire your donations, hoping that will extend our good fortune. See, for example, this map of New York, the eleventh state to ratify the Constitution. In the past fifteen years, our curator of newspapers has added to the library almost 60,000 issues and 1,248 titles of newspapers from 160 New York towns such as Albany, Cooperstown, Poughkeepsie, Skaneateles, and Utica. Your donation will help us acquire additional material about the Empire State—and the other forty-nine, too!
A donation in the amount of your choice will be put toward a future purchase when funds are running short in the eleventh hour. Our goal? To raise eleven thousand dollars between May 11 and June 11!
Head over to the Fund-a-Book page, now live, for more fun highlights from the collections and to make a contribution. Who knows—some of those new purchases could even end up here on the blog as Acquisitions Table features!
