We hope to see you in the library in person tomorrow, Tuesday, April 3, at 6 p.m. AAS's 5th annual Adopt-a-Book event will be an evening of food, drinks, original collection materials, and curatorial knowledge-sharing (although some of the preceeding are going to be kept separate from each other). You can browse the 2012 Adopt-A-Book Catalog to view the ...
The Boys’ and Girls’ American Annual: A Christmas and New Year’s Present for Young People. New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1861. This utterly charming chromolithographed winter scene of a boy feeding deer is the frontispiece to our newly acquired copy of The Boys’ and Girls’ American Annual. It is unabashedly devoted to leisure reading. The ...
The American Juvenile Pictorial Primer. New York: Edward Dunigan, 1843. Up until about 1820, The New England Primer, with its religiously inspired alphabet, account of John Rogers’s burning at the stake, and religious dialogues, dominated the American primer market. By the 1840s, secular primers like The American Juvenile Primer featuring pictures and large type became quite ...
In the intervening week or so since my post on this mysterious image appeared on the AAS blog, I contacted Alexander Anderson scholar and AAS member Jane Pomeroy. She graciously sent me this scanned copy of the full image found in her copy of the Mahlon Day 1830 edition of Divine Songs. According to Jane, she ...
Recently, I was catching up on cataloging the nineteenth-century editions of Isaac Watts’ Divine Songs given to us by the great collector of early American and English children’s books Wilbur Macey Stone (1862-1941). One of them, a well-worn edition issued by New York publisher Mahlon Day in 1830, contains a mutilated frontispiece depicting this interesting ...
The frontispiece to this elocution text features a rare illustration of a young lady doing physical exercise along with her male colleagues to prepare for speaking. By 1867, female reformers like Lucy Stone had blazed new trails for women as public speakers before mixed audiences of men and women. To reflect this change in social ...
Don’t let the utilitarian title fool you! In this case, it is not what was printed but what a former owner drew on a flyleaf that is the book’s true treasure. Mimicking a popular political cartoon of the time, a Union soldier chases a cross-dressing Jefferson Davis—giving us a rare glimpse into the intersection between ...
Brother Joseph. The White Knight or The Rock of the Candle. (Brother James’s Library). Philadelphia: Henry McGrath, 1867. American Catholic children’s literature is rare before 1850, and The White Knight exemplifies the modest boom in Catholic publishing after the Civil War. The back pages contain advertisements for the Catholic Pocket Library, and books for parochial libraries ...
The Boy’s Treasury of Sports, Pastimes, and Recreations. Fourth American edition. New York: Clark, Austin & Co., 1850. Striped publisher’s cloth bindings are rare, and such a binding on a children’s book in good condition is even rarer. The charming gilt vignette of boys at play puts an added layer on an already delightful binding.
The New Pretty Village. Church Set. New York: McLoughlin Bros., 1897. The McLoughlin Brothers dominated both the picture book and game markets in late 19th-century America, and The New Pretty Village is a wonderful example of McLoughlin’s halcyon era. This segment of the ideal suburban village includes cardboard models of a church, a stately house, a ...
Snow White and Red Rose. New York: McLoughlin, 1899. This magnificent chromolithograph of “An Exciting Donkey-Ride at the Seashore” is taken from this collection of fairy tales and poems. It is an excellent example of McLoughlin’s turn-of-the-century idealized portrayals of children at play. Purchased from Christopher Holtom. Harry G. Stoddard Memorial Fund. More information: Read more about the McLoughlin ...
The New Tale of a Tub. London & New York: George Routledge and Sons, [ca. 1870] The Routledge firm was a popular transatlantic picture book publisher and a direct competitor of McLoughlin Bros. The New Tale of Tub is a humorous poem about two Bengalese gentlemen whose picnic feast is interrupted by the approach of a ...
Day-Dawn. New York: American Tract Society, [ca. 1860] Devotional books containing brief Bible passages for daily reading were frequently printed in two-inch miniature format so as to easily fit in a pocket. The American Tract Society was a major 19th-century publisher of these pocket devotionals. This title is new to AAS, and features a splendid gilt ...
The Comical Boys. Philadelphia: J.B. Keller, [ca. 1852] John B. Keller, like his New York counterparts Philip J. Cozans and Elton & Co., specialized in publishing cheap picture books with brashly hand-colored wood engravings. Comical Boys chronicles the misadventures of boys, as in the case of poor Christopher Crow, who ran into a pump handle. The ...
This haunting lithograph depicting Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Match-Girl is taken from the rare collection of Hans Andersen’s stories, Good Wishes for the Children, interpreted by A.A.B. and S.G.P., published by the famed Riverside Press in 1873. AAS acquired its copy from the illustrious bookman Benjamin Tighe in 1967, and up until now, the ...
