At the July 4, 1818, anniversary of its founding the New York Typographical Society celebrated with one of its typical ceremonies. Since its establishment in 1809, the Society had commemorated its anniversary every year with an evening of toasts and odes dedicated to the art of printing. Those in attendance at ...
Every Wednesday before Thanksgiving for the past fifty years, the Wall Street Journal has published excerpts from Nathaniel Morton's 1669 history of the Plymouth colony, New Englands Memoriall, on its editorial page. While Morton's history does contain the first published list of those who signed the Mayflower Compact, it features only a negligible account of ...
"Poetry, as well as History, has consecrated the achievements of Columbus. But we must leave, for the present, to History and Poetry the pleasing task of dwelling on individual characters. The appropriate researches of the Antiquary aim at objects less exposed to ordinary notice, yet illustrative often of the interests of nations." So said William ...
It is probably not news to readers of this blog that The New York Times recently, and favorably, reviewed the American Antiquarian Society's Grolier Club exhibition "In Pursuit of a Vision." But readers familiar with the two societies neither will be surprised that the AAS has exhibited at the Grolier Club in the past (in ...
“Did he say anything about politics?” “Not a word. We talked mostly about books.” “Books! What does he know about books?” From Henry Adams, Democracy One of the more enjoyable aspects of working with old books all day is having the chance to see what past owners have tucked away for safe-keeping in the leaves of those books. Just ...
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," ...
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 ...
Purely physical love for a book can sometimes be a book’s worst enemy. By fingering the books, prints, manuscripts, and newspapers in AAS collections, each reader and researcher contributes to the slow death of our materials. In his novel In the Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco writes that the saliva and dust left behind ...
In April 1836, the future attorney and activist Richard Henry Dana was busy binding books aboard the brig Alert. Yes, binding books, not reading them. Dana might have been reading had a bad case of the measles and an even worse case of myopia not forced him to leave Harvard for a couple of years. ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Book sales may be up overall this year due to the introduction of e-readers (see the New York Times report here). But strange fears about the demise of the book still abound (read the New York Times on old-fashioned book covers and e-readers here). Are Americans simply afraid to buy books, or afraid that we’re, ...
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 ...
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 ...
