Mortimer, Favell Lee. Iu Pitabun. Boston: American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 1844. This is an extremely rare Chippewa language translation of Favell Lee Mortimer’s adaptation of Bible stories. It was formerly owned by renowned Americana collector George Brinley (1817-1875), whose collection was sold off in a series of auctions after his death. This ...
A Cheap Primer for the Blind. Louisville, Ky.: American Printing House for the Blind, 1874. This primer is printed in large oblong format with raised-letter type known as Boston line. AAS has some thirty titles printed in Boston line; about half of which were actually published for the blind, as opposed to providing samples of the ...
Richardson, Samuel. The History of Pamela or Virtue Rewarded. New York: N.C. Nafis, 1835. This tale of a young woman’s rise from servant to a charitable and understanding wife of a wealthy man was a bestseller in the long eighteenth century. The frontispiece is a metal engraving of Pamela embracing her husband’s daughter from a previous ...
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 ...
