To continue the celebration of the American Library Association’s 2014 Preservation Week held back in April (and mentioned in an earlier post), we're bringing you a behind-the-scenes peek into a conservation project that started just a couple weeks ago on a recent acquisition – a Bay Psalm Book from 1709. The revitalization process for this ...
Riding the wave of our recent James Russell Wiggins lecture’s Franklin-iana and the American Library Association’s 2014 Preservation Week: Pass it On (which takes place April 27-May 4, 2014), we found ourselves struck by the Benjamin Franklin quotation, “An ounce of preservation is worth a pound of cure.” Although Franklin was speaking about fire safety ...
Living in the stacks amongst the vast collections of historical primary source material at AAS, one will find books of a much younger age. AAS does not only seek to collect one copy of every thing printed in the United States up until about 1876; we also strive to add recent scholarship written about topics ...
This year the American Antiquarian Society will be holding its 7th annual Adopt-a-Book event on Tuesday, May 6th, from 6:00 to 8:00pm. This event has been an entertaining and successful fundraiser for the library’s continued acquisitions of historic material. The money raised helps curators buy more books, pamphlets, prints, newspapers, and manuscripts. On May 6th, participants ...
January 6, 2014, marked a notable acquisition here at the American Antiquarian Society. It also signaled the end of an era. When the Society’s current library building opened in 1910, it featured library tables and chairs manufactured by the Francis H. Bacon Furniture Company of Boston. For over a century, readers engaged with AAS’s peerless ...
Molly O’Hagan Hardy is AAS digital humanities curator and an ACLS public fellow. Every month on Past is Present she will be sharing news on digitization efforts at AAS, coverage of digital humanities projects using AAS materials, and ideas for such projects. Stay current with all things DH at AAS by checking out the “Digital ...
As many researchers already know, life stops in 1876 for many parts of the American Antiquarian Society’s collections which are limited to the pre-Centennial era. Recently, however, the Society has amended its collection policies to permit the curator of graphic arts to add prints produced between 1876 and 1900 to the Society’s holdings in order ...
Discovery Channel may have cornered the market on Shark Week, but here at Past is Present we are instituting our own Fraud Week to explore the seamier underside of the archive. Or perhaps we will discover that there is another side to fakes, forgeries, and frauds, in a similar manner to how Shark Week ...
Chelsea White, past AAS intern and present Simmons MLS student, has transcribed a diary from AAS's collections that will become our newest Line-a-Day blog debuting with the new year. Here is her introduction: If you’ve enjoyed reading the A Day in the Life of a Blacksmith or the A Day in the Life of a Schoolmarm ...
Assistant Curator of Manuscripts and Assistant Reference Library Tracey Kry comments on her impressions of AAS as a newly-arrived employee. A couple of months ago now, we had a post about creating an AAS Glossary that would talk about terms and collections unique to AAS (http://pastispresent.org/category/aas-glossary/ ). The first post was about people’s confusion with the ...
Like the other catalogers here at AAS, part of my job as the Graphic Arts cataloger is to figure out the artists, sitters, publishers and others who contributed to the works in the collection. So when I catalogued a large color lithograph view of Portland, Oregon from 1891, I noticed that the copyright holders were ...
There is something fitting in one librarian coming to the aid of another. The mystery surrounding the New York Times 1964 claim that the Adams family celebrated July 4, 1776 with “Green turtle soup, New England poached salmon with egg sauce and apple pan dowdy,” found a resolution with the detective work of New York ...
If Abigail Adams were planning an Independence Day feast what would she make? According to a 1964 New York Times article: “green turtle soup, New England poached salmon with egg sauce and apple pan dowdy.” In fact, the article claims she served this fine menu to John Adams on the very first Independence Day. Is ...
Avis G. Clarke, cataloger-cum-researcher of early American imprints and printers, filled hundreds of AAS card catalogue drawers with the AAS printers’ file. Detailing the lives and works of virtually every printer working in America before 1820, the printers’ file is a masterpiece of indexing. Comprising 134 drawers of biographical, printing, and publication ...
Ding, ding, ding... We have a winner! Our exercise in crowd-sourcing research questions was a success, and all the antiquarian glory goes to peterme for solving the reference mystery posed in our earlier post. The correct book our reader was looking for was (drum-roll please) “The Way Our People Lived: an Intimate American ...
