Growing, Growing, Gone

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 Wretch," ...

Bibliothanatography

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 ...

A Stately Pleasure Dome? Fanny Hill at AAS

Past is Present's series of posts on the upcoming Adopt-a-Book event will resume tomorrow.  For today, please enjoy this story of (un)covered literary history. Ungracious then as the task may be, I shall recall to view those scandalous stages of my life… So say the marbled boards** (see further information below) covering AAS’s copy of Jonas Hanway’s ...

Fraud Week, Part 4: Downright Theft–or is it?

If we’re to believe iconic popular culture films like Christian Slater’s 1990 Pump Up the Volume, media and information pirates act as heroic rebels fighting an overbearing FCC and even more overbearing parents.  If we’re to believe historians like Adrian Johns, author of the recently published Piracy and Death of a Pirate, piracy has fostered ...

Adventures of an American Classic

Historians of American life and culture have studied and argued about Mark Twain's use of dialect in his Adventures of Huckleberry Finn since the novel's U.S. publication on this date in February 1885.  Censors and bowdlerizers have made efforts to prevent students and others from reading the novel with its dialect intact.  From early ...

Private Libraries in a Digital Age

01

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 ...

“Animal Magnetism” at its best

animalmagnatism

Over two hundred years ago Elizabeth Inchbald wrote and published the three act farce Animal Magnetism.  Heavily criticizing Mesmer’s magnetized baths and healing wands, this typical eighteenth-century afterpiece farce features befuddled lovers, lovers’ ruses, and battle of the sexes.  Two hundred years later, befuddled lovers remain but Animal Magnetism is now carefully housed in AAS's ...

“Who did it? The Maine Question”

whodidit

Returning the occasional game to the AAS graphic arts department does not usually result in discovering the explosives that blew up the USS Maine in 1898. Well, it never does, actually.  But when Jennifer Burek Pierce, Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa’s School of Library and Information Science and recent Jay and Deborah Last ...

Goodbye Blacksmith, Hello Schoolmarm!

school

When Diann Benti, former AAS assistant reference librarian, created our now (nearly) complete anonymous blacksmith blog, she was inspired to do so by the Massachusetts Historical Society’s tweeting John Quincy Adams. Past is Present would never have a tweeting blacksmith, Diann informed us in her blog post when the blacksmith initially forged his way ...

On “Readies” and Fore-edge Painting

Book of Common Prayer.  New York D. Appleton & Co., 1845.  Gilt fore-edge.

In a New York Times Book Review article last month, Jennifer Schuessler quoted Bob Brown, an early proponent of electronic reading devices.  In his prescient manifesto, "The Readies," Brown declared: “The written word hasn’t kept up with the age....  Writing has been bottled up in books since the start."  Brown called for no less than ...

AAS Helped Compile an Early African American Bibliography

murray1

Toward the end of his now-famous 1897 Atlantic Monthly essay, "Strivings of the Negro People," W.E.B. DuBois states that the post-Civil War years brought for African Americans “the ideal of book-learning, the curiosity, born of compulsory ignorance.” Historians may note DuBois’ ultimate discontent with this ideal -- the longing to achieve freedom through ‘book-learning” -- ...

Typefindings: Good Old College Days

rutgers

Today's university may be in need of a revolution of its own, what with its failure to create true interdisciplinary conversation and its isolation from the wider public.  The late eighteenth-century college did not exist in such isolation from the people, though few colleges became hotbeds of revolutionary activity during the war like Queen's College (now Rutgers University). ...