Typically, curators purchase collection material from dealers, auctions, and bookfairs. Less common is the unsolicited offer from someone who found something in their house. Early this past summer [2024], a woman from West Virginia called AAS – on the recommendation of a dealer she had consulted – about a newspaper she found among other old ...
Benjamin Lundy was a prominent abolitionist in the 1820’s and 1830’s. Brought up as a Quaker in what is now West Virginia, he saw the iniquity of slavery. In 1821 he started the Genius of Universal Emancipation in Mount Pleasant, Ohio. From there the periodical moved several times, being published in Greenville, TN; Baltimore, MD; Washington, ...
The publication of the first issue of a newspaper is a momentous occasion. After scraping together the funding to purchase equipment, lining up supplies, hiring staff, soliciting subscriptions, selling advertisements, and gathering news to print, the newspaper rolls off the press and is ready to be placed in the hands of the public for them ...
Curators look far and wide trying to find materials for their institution’s collection. Despite this, sometimes the most amazing items show up locally. AAS photographer, Nathan Fiske, brought to my attention a local estate auction that had two newspapers in it. As it turned out, both were newspapers published by Frederick Douglass. The first one ...
The Countryman (Turnwold, Georgia), 1862–1866. 163 issues. The Countryman is the only newspaper published on a Southern plantation. The owner of the plantation, Joseph Turner, started this paper on March 4, 1862. In advertisements he placed in various newspapers he wrote, “We do not profess to publish a NEWS paper, for, under the circumstances, that is ...
The Whip (New York, New York), Oct. 8, 1842. Racy papers were scandalous newspapers mostly published in the 1840s and 1850s in New York and Boston. AAS has one of the larger institutional collections of these lowbrow papers. Opportunities to acquire additional issues of these papers are few and far between. An issue for one of the ...
One of the duties of a curator at the American Antiquarian Society is to interact with dealers of antiquarian books, manuscripts, and paper ephemera. Over time we develop professional relationships with them as we get to know what type of materials they have, and they get to know our wants. In 2003 I was using eBay ...
Want to see a souvenir score card from the 1915 World Series between the Red Sox and the Phillies? How about first editions by Lewis Carroll, Stephen King, Jonathan Swift, Sylvia Plath, or Toni Morrison? A signed photograph of Harry Houdini? A book printed from wood blocks in 1250? An illustrated Japanese edition of Don ...
Last week we asked readers to figure out which five from a list of thirty nineteenth-century campaign newspaper titles were fake. Here are the answers. How did you do? Sober Second Thought (Hartford, CT), 1841 A Democratic newspaper supporting Martin Van Buren. Castigator (Middletown, CT), 1840 Another Democratic newspaper supporting Martin Van Buren. A Kick in the Pants - Fake ...
This election year the verbal thrusts and parries have been fast and thick throughout the primaries. Today Facebook and Twitter are as important as radio and TV in spreading the vitriolic name-calling and accusations of various candidates. In the nineteenth century politicians had to resort to print media, and one way to do this was ...
“Fenway is the essence of baseball.” - Tom Seaver “I see great things in baseball.” - Walt Whitman It is April and once again it is a fresh, new season of baseball. The sports pages are full of box scores and statistics. Bars are filled with people arguing over batting orders and when pitchers should have been ...
What do a wolverine, sunshine, runaway sailors, weaving, and baseball have in common? These are the titles or subjects of items available at our ninth annual Adopt-a-Book program! Once again our intrepid curators have put together a group of items acquired over the past year or so and put them up for “adoption.” Supporters of ...
Last week we posted ten nineteenth-century newspaper titles, which included three fake ones. Here are the real titles from that list with images of the mastheads as proof. 1. Sucker and Farmer’s Record (Pittsfield, IL). March 30, 1843. At that time people of that region were sometimes known as suckers. See the reply in this previous blog ...
When you look at the names of current newspapers you see much sameness in the titles. How often do you see Times, Post, Globe, Union, Herald, Sun, Independent, or Tribune as part of the title? Once in a while you might run across a paper still published today, such as the Quincy Herald-Whig (IL), which ...
Asylum Journal (Brattleboro, VT) November 22, 1842 Published every Tuesday, By the inmates of the Vermont Asylum. The Asylum Journal was published at the Vermont Asylum for the Insane, a private institution founded in 1834 by Anna Hunt Marshall. It used a humane form of treatment on its patients, based on the theories of William Tuke ...
