The Acquisitions Table: Index or Pointer or Book Mark. Ansonia, Connecticut: Wallace & Sons, 1858.

Index or Pointer or Book Mark. Ansonia, Connecticut: Wallace & Sons, 1858. On October 10, 1858, the manufacturing firm Wallace & Sons (founded 1848) took out a patent to make foldable bookmarks from brass. The company’s primary product was brass fasteners for hoop (or skeleton) skirts which were becoming fashionable in the late 1850s. One ...

The Acquisitions Table: Birthday and Autograph Album, 1874.

Birthday and Autograph Album. Bethlehem [Pa.]: Henry T. Clauder, 1874. Partially printed books that were meant to be filled in by their owners have been of particular interest to AAS’s curators over many years. AAS’s online catalog already has more than 200 records with the genre term: Partly printed, partly blank books. One example is a recently ...

The Acquisitions Table: Francis Lawton, Letter, 1845

Cuffe Lawton (b. 1789) was a free black man who was born in Newport, Rhode Island, and lived in New Bedford, Massachusetts. His son, Francis Lawton (1822-1885) was born in New Bedford  and became a whale man, who eventually rose to the rank of mate and traveled to Hawaii. By the 1850s Francis was married ...

The Acquisitions Table: The North Star (Rochester, NY), June 5, 1851.

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 Acquisitions Table: An Unidentified Printing Office by Photographer C.P. Michael

The Society’s collection of photographs of working print shops continues to expand (see blog posts on this topic from 2014 and 2017). Most of the photographs feature businesses in New England, New York, or Pennsylvania. This newly acquired photo, showing a tidy shop with a ca. 1882 Hoe flatbed newspaper press, was taken in Nebraska. ...

The Acquisitions Table: The White Horse by Bertha Johnston

I recently purchased from booksellers David Szewczyk and Cynthia Davis Buffington a copy of what might very well be the first children’s book printed in Vermillion, Dakota Territory (now South Dakota). This 1876 piece of juvenilia is titled The White Horse and written by one Bertha Johnston, who is described on the title page as ...

The Acquisitions Table: The Countryman  

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 Acquisitions Table: Little Marian

Little Marian. Philadelphia: American Sunday-School Union, [ca. 1853-1857].  The American Sunday-School Union was a pioneer in the use of the shaped book format and chromolithography, competing directly with secular firms including McLoughlin Brothers. Little Marian serves as a sequel to the Pilgrim’s Progress-inspired children’s book Little Marian’s Pilgrimage, issued by the ASSU ca. 1852. The earlier ...

The Acquisitions Table: The Whip

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 ...

The Acquisitions Table: Friendship Album, 1842-1846

Esther Blackmer, Friendship Album, 1842-1846 This album looks similar to other albums from the period, with its hand-colored lithographs and manuscript poetry. The album’s  owner, unlike the many students who kept friendship albums, was a chambermaid at the State Lunatic Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts. The hospital's trustees’ report indicates that Esther Blackmer’s compensation was board plus ...

The Acquisitions Table: Sermons by Joseph Avery, 1773-1777

Joseph Avery, Sermons, 1773-1777 The Society already had several collections relating to Joseph Avery, a minister in Holden from 1774 until his death in 1824, before acquiring these fifty-seven sermons. In addition to our Holden, Massachusetts, records, which contain some Avery correspondence, we have a collection of records from Holden’s First Congregational Church, where Avery was ...

The Acquisitions Table: The Great Bloomer Prize Fight

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John L. Magee. The Great Bloomer Prize Fight for the Champion’s Belt. New York, 1851. This lithographed cartoon depicts two women in bloomer costume preparing for a fight. One stands at center, ready to box, while the second sits on a man’s knee and hides her face. The cartoon was drawn by John Magee of New York ...

The Acquisitions Table: Daguerreotype Apparatus

Daguerreotype Apparatus broadside

Daguerreotype Apparatus. Boston: H.P. Lewis, 1840. The technical elements of daguerreotypy were presented by Louis Daguerre to the world in Paris in August of 1839. By September, a technical manual, in French, was for sale on the streets of Paris and London. At the end of September 1839, an Englishman named D. W. Seager was in New York demonstrating the process, and he ...

The Acquisitions Table: Steel Printing Plate for “Echoes of the Woods”

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Nicolas Valstin, engraver. Echoes of the Woods and Shepherdess and the Birds. Saint Louis: Kunkel Brothers, ca. 1871-1878. This steel printing plate was used to create sheet music covers. The two tunes that would have been found inside this cover were both popular in the United States until about 1900. Both were reissued multiple times by the publishing ...

The Acquisitions Table: The Spectroscope and Its Applications

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Lockyer, J. Norman. The Spectroscope and Its Applications. London and New York: Macmillan and Co., 1873. This manual on the spectroscope is part of Macmillan’s Nature Series and is bound in publisher's brick red cloth with gilt and black stamped front cover. Pasted onto the title page is a colorful watercolor spectrum with the initials "J.B.L." ...