Just a reminder that the best way to escape the dreary weather (besides a tropical vacation) is a relaxing evening with a glass of wine, delicious food, and some good books. If you agree, please join us tonight at the American Antiquarian Society for our annual Adopt-a-Book event beginning at 6pm. You may also attend vicariously by checking out the Adopt-a-Book online catalog. Logistical information is available on our events calendar.
Hope to see you this evening!
AAS holds in its manuscripts collections an excerpted diary of a convict from the 19th century. It is a small unassuming volume of just under fifty pages on plain brown paper, and doesn’t visually grab your attention. It was the title on the front page that piqued my curiosity: Promiscuous Leaves from My Diary.
A glance inside confirms that it is not a usual diary. It is allegedly a collection of entries from a prison diary, which bears a gift inscription to an Anthony S. Morse, a prison inspector. The relationship of the writer of the diary to Mr. Morse is unknown, though an educated guess might be that it is related to trying to win the diary writer’s freedom.
The diary leaves me with a number of questions:
1. If the alleged original diary actually existed at one time, and it has not been lost or destroyed, where is it?
2. The length of the original diary is not clear, when did the diary begin? Furthermore, when did it end?
3. The prisoner speaks of facing a very long imprisonment. Did he ever get out of prison?
4. The writer of the diary, at least according to what he has chosen to excerpt, is quite convinced of his own innocence. If there’s any historical evidence, which way does it point?
I plan to post a bit of this diary at a time, while also researching the context and the person who wrote the diary. Hopefully, we’ll all learn a few things, and have some fun along the way! I think you’ll agree once you read some of the diary that it’s an intriguing document.
We begin with the front and back of the first three leaves:
[book id=’13? /]
Intrigued? Stay tuned for the next installment…
Beware of a swindler!! New York: J.W. Bell, 1835.
This spectacular broadside documents the accusations of printer Jared W. Bell (1798?-1870) against a former journeyman, James B. Whitney. Bell accuses Whitney, who became a lieutenant commandant in the New York artillery, of embezzling money from Bell’s printing business. Bell was notoriously difficult. In 1821 he got into a street fight over the Hartford Convention and was arrested for blasphemy (he allegedly yelled, “God Almighty was a fool”). Bell was acquitted, but, as evidenced by this broadside, apparently remained a cantankerous New Yorker. Purchased from Thomas Cullen. Ahmanson Foundation Fund.
~ Lauren Hewes
Some of the American Antiquarian Society’s collection materials have been on our shelves for almost 200 years, but other items are “new” antiquities. New, that is, in the way that hand-me-downs from your older sister are new. They are new to us even if they have existed for hundreds of years elsewhere.
The AAS curators specialize in attracting these ones that got away. The curators are avaricious hunters (it’s not a sin if you’re doing it for the good of all), ready to pounce on materials that belong at AAS. Of course, you can help support the collecting mission of AAS by bringing us items you have that were printed in the U.S. before 1876. But not all of us have antiquarian goodies stashed in the closet or attic.
Now the rest of us can help AAS acquire “new” materials though the annual Adopt-a-Book event. This year the bash will be held on Tuesday, March 30th, at 6pm. Tickets cost $30 and include drinks and hors d’oeuvres. The party makes for a wonderful evening in itself. When else can you have a glass of wine and mingle with fellow bookish folks in one corner of the reading room while in a separate alcove (because we all know wine isn’t good for books!) you can browse though over one-hundred original items all well over 100 years old and begging for you to adopt them? RSVP information is online. Even if you are unfortunate enough to be busy that night, you can check out the Adopt-a-Book catalog online.
Here is how the book adoption process works: generous friends of AAS donate the money that it cost the curator to purchase your adoptee. This gives the curator more money to go out and purchase more items. Although you can’t take your adoptee home, we will put a bookplate in it and will add your name to the online record so you will be immortalized as the donor. If you tell us your adoption story we may even feature your reasons for adopting on our blog, but only if you want us to do so.
Many people adopt materials in honor of a loved one. This post highlights a few items from the Adopt-a-Book catalog that would be great gift ideas. They are roughly in numerical order so you can easily find the illustrations and full descriptions of each item in the Adopt-a-Book catalog. The gift-giving options are limitless, or at least up to 147. No promises, though, that the items highlighted here are still available for adoption — if the past is any indication, they will be claimed fast!
For a New Reader, or an Animal Lover, or Both:
6. ANIMAL ALPHABET. Adopt me for: $250
Alphabet of Natural History. Hartford: D.W. Kellogg & Co., [ca. 1830-1842]
A Christmas Gift for the Chocolate Lover in Your Life:
8C. ANGEL’S CHRISTMAS. Adopt me for: $50
Walton, Mrs. O.F. Angel’s Christmas. New York: American Tract Society, [ca. 1870s]
Two Ideas for A Wedding Present:
138. TASTEFUL WEDDING GIFT?
Adopt me for: $75
The wedding gift, to all who are entering the marriage state. Worcester, MA: S. A. Howland, 1849.
OR
12. AFTER … Adopt me for: $75
Baillie, James. Married. Hand-colored lithograph. New York, [1848 or 1849]
Paired with the title Single, by the same lithographic publisher, this image forms a lovely pendant on the role of the man in family life. No longer smoking and surrounded by symbols of leisure, the young bachelor from the first print now appears seated in a formal parlor with his wife and four children.
~ Lauren Hewes
For A Bachelor Party:
12. Before …
Adopt me for: $75
Baillie, James. Single. Hand-colored lithograph. New York, 1848.
For the Rooster Fanatic in Your Life (you know we all have them):
15. ROOSTERS FOR PIERCE! Adopt me for: $50 
Bedford Gazette (PA). Nov. 5, 1852.
This newspaper issue is unusual because of the large, crude woodcut, taking up almost the entire second page, which celebrates the victory of General Franklin Pierce as 14th president. At this time the symbols of the Democratic and Whig parties were, respectively, the rooster and the raccoon. The rooster was carved on the side of a single wooden plank.
~ Vincent Golden
For Your Nephew’s Birthday:
22. BOYS’ PUMP BOOK. Adopt me for: $200
The Boys’ Pump Book: Showing how to Make Several Kinds of Miniature Pumps and a Fire Engine. New York: Anson D. F. Randolph, 1860.
For the Coolest Bibliophile You Know:
23. BIBLIOPEGISTICAL VERSE. Adopt me for: $150
Bradford, John. The poetical vagaries of a Knight of the Folding-Stick, of Paste Castle: to which is annexed, The history of the garret, &c. Gotham [i.e. Newark, NJ?]: The author, 1815.
A rare copy in original printed boards of an extraordinary and little-known verse collection. Although published anonymously, the book’s copyright was taken out by one John Bradford, who worked as a bookbinder in New York City from 1809-1819. Indeed, the first section consists mostly of poems about bookbinding—one of the very, very few instances of 
bibliopegistical poetry in all of Western culture. The poems include “This World’s a Huge Bindery,” “Receipt for Binding a Book,” “The Binder’s Curse,” and “An Enigmatical List of Binder’s Tools,” consisting of 34 devilishly difficult verse riddles. Here’s a simpler one that this curator managed to solve:
The two ninths of one who commences a suit,
O.U. G—and the eleventh of a hot biting root.
[answer: PLOUGH]
One of the two inserted engravings depicts the Knight of the Folding-Stick, a fantastical creation fashioned from binder’s tools. The book concludes with “The History of the Garret,” a facetious prose history of Newark, NJ.
~ David Whitesell
For A Newspaper Enthusiast (or your paper boy if he’s really amazing?)
26. ALL THE NEWS THAT FITS. Adopt me for: $350
Centinel of Freedom (Newark, NJ). Dec. 5 extra, 1799.
An extremely rare extra edition—only one other copy can be found in institutional collections. It contains the speech President John Adams made to the opening of the sixth Congress, as well as King George III’s speech opening a new session of Parliament. Interestingly, to accommodate the text, the printer used the right margin by turning the text 90 degrees to fit it all in.
~ Vincent Golden
For Your Pastor:
29. PASTOR’S NOTEBOOK. Adopt me for: $300 
Coddington, Elijah. Notebook, 1773-1826.
Coddington (1742-1830) was the fourth pastor of the Baptist church in South Brimfield (later Wales), MA from 1773 until 1826. This notebook contains records of marriages, diary entries, accounts, and various religious comments including the following: “The Apostles were men abstemious in their lives & plain in their attire, humble in their walk and mighty in their Conversation. One sickens at the contrast between the Apostles & modern Clergymen—do mitred heads & powdered locks, Silken gowns & couloured Shews, Gilded pulpits, threadbare Sermons & rounded Salaries bespeak these the Successors of fishermen & tent makers?”
~ Thomas Knoles
For a Numismatist:
30. COIN COLLECTOR’S HANDBOOK. Adopt me for: $450
The coins of the world. Philadelphia: Matthew T. Miller, [1849]
First edition of one of the earliest American numismatic publications.
~ David Whitesell
For Newlyweds:
34. A “PHILOSOPHICAL” BOOK. 
Adopt me for: $200
The complete master-piece of Aristotle, the famous philosopher. Displaying the secrets of nature in the generation of man … New York: Printed for the publishers, 1842.
The latest addition to AAS’s peerless collection of over 50 editions of the standard early American sex manual: Aristotle’s master-piece. AAS’s holdings begin with the “25th” edition of 1748—possibly an American printing, though perhaps an English import—and ends with this 1842 printing, by which time Aristotle was being superseded by newer, competing manuals. Unusual for such a work, the well-preserved binding of yellow paper boards loudly calls attention to itself through two appropriate wood engravings: an American Eden on front, and a contemporary American Venus on the back.
~ David Whitesell
For a Military Enthusiast:
37. MEXICAN WAR PRINT. Adopt me for: $75
Currier, Nathaniel. Landing of the American forces under Genl. Scott at Vera Cruz March 9th. 1847. Hand-colored lithograph. New York, 1847.
For a Democrat:
43. VOTE DEMOCRATIC!
Adopt me for: $25
Election ballot, Liberal Democratic ticket, “Adams and Liberty.” [Massachusetts, 1870]
In case you thought I was exaggerating about items being adopted fast, in the time since I started this post someone just adopted #44, which was going to be my recommendation for a gift for a Republican! Best of luck in adopting, and remember, even if you miss out on the one you’ve always wanted, you can come see all the adoptees in person on Tues., March 30th.
Here at AAS we have lots of small collections that are safely tucked away, accessible only due to the knowledge of the reference staff, catalogers, or curators who bump into them occasionally when searching for other things. As we work our way through our holdings we try to increase access to these “lost” collections by creating finding aids and box lists that can then be loaded onto our website or into our online catalog. Often we process these collections ourselves, but occasionally we use willing interns or volunteers. 
First, a description of the collection at hand: The Society’s Graphic Arts collection includes a sampling of material by the photographer Theodor Clemens Wohlbrück (1879-1936), including glass plate negatives, postcards, and prints. As a young man, Wohlbrück settled in Worcester, Massachusetts, and set up a studio on Main Street where he operated successfully from the end of the nineteenth century until around 1911. Wohlbrück is best known for his images of the people and streets of Worcester as well as depictions of urban events such as parades and celebrations. Our collection of his work also includes a group of over 1,000 proof prints featuring landscape views of towns around Worcester County. Many were rough mounted and hand-tinted by the photographer. These prints have long been stored in heavy, red boxes and were only very generally sorted by town. Some unmounted images had slipped out of order and users were often frustrated when trying to access the collection. No one knew which towns were included in the collection and which were left out (there are no images of Worcester in this group, for example).
Now, enter the volunteer: Bill Mettey lives in Upton, Massachusetts, and has spent years in the county, hiking and exploring the landscape. He has previous experience as a videographer and is used to looking through camera lenses. 
He is also an organized sort of person and is willing to dedicate several hours of his time each week to the Society. Previously he has helped us to sort and folder our political cartoons, broadside advertisements, and Civil War era maps. For the Wohlbrück project, he has proved to be a perfect match. Often he is able to identify an image based on his own experience and knowledge of a town. Many of the prints were captioned by Wohlbrück and Bill has learned to decipher the photographer’s scrawling handwriting. While we are still processing the collection and hope to order materials for improved housing, Bill has already sorted and reboxed the prints and created a very useful box list of the collection, organized alphabetically by town. An itemized inventory listing each photograph is currently underway as Bill continues his work.
It is great when we can match a volunteer or intern task to a person’s interest. If you are interested in volunteering at the Society, please refer to our website for more information about volunteering. And, most importantly, thanks, Bill!
All the votes have been counted and the winner is…. Penny!
Penny’s caption won our hearts and received the most thumbs up in Past is Present‘s first humorous what-caption-would-you-write contest.
Her submission had the added bonus of connecting to the original post on Slate, before the hype by AAS’s curator of Graphic Arts, Lauren Hewes. Feel free to give your acceptance speech as a comment on this post, Penny!
Honorable mentions should go to our other nominees, especially Sharlene for “Little Lawrence finds out too late that although slate is rock, it will break when thrown to ground during a temper tantrum” and Ken Richardson (who posted the first comment) for “I don’t want to look like daddy!!” You can check out all the caption comments by clicking here.
On a related note, Past is Present has been giving away enough awards lately that we need to have a name for our prizes. Does anyone have an idea for a good name for our antiquarian-glory-only prizes? We can promise you in return your very own one of our name-to-be-determined awards in the category of neologisms. Here are a few further thoughts to spark your collective creative spirit.
Abbreviations are always a good source of award names. For example, a good friend of AAS created the Rellas, or Research Library Awards, which she awarded to various institutions on her blog, AuntieQuarian. We could go in a similar direction with something like the PiPs.
Awards tap in to the part of us all that likes to be recognized for our abilities. In the nineteenth-century, 
rewards of merit were the hot pedagogical teaching tool. If you search AAS’s online catalog for the genre rewards of merit you will find almost 2,000 examples, many of which are digitized in our digital partner Readex’s American Broadsides & Ephemera.
The awards you really wanted to get in early America, though, was a Premiums. That’s because Premiums meant money. They were most often awarded for agriculture, but in 1796 the American Philosophical Society announced they would award premiums “to the authors of the best performances, inventions, or improvements, relative to certain specific subjects of useful knowledge.” By 1806, the APS was laying out conditions for their Magellanic and extra-Magellanic Premiums. The Magellanic Premium was named in honor of the donor of the fund, Dr. John Hyacinth De Magellan of London, and the recipient of the second award apparently had to be extra-Magellanic. You would have to read their pamphlet of conditions to find out exactly what that would entail.
Sometimes an award has a boring name like the Academy Awards and so needs to be spiced up with a fun nickname like the Oscars. In our case, I guess our awards could be familiarly called the Isaiahs, in honor of AAS’s founder, Isaiah Thomas.
Here at Past is Present we can’t promise a parade of designer dresses like the Academy Awards, but we can promise to keep the awards coming. So send us all your best ideas for names and once again all the Past is Present readers can vote for their favorites. The voting will be open to all, which is more than the Oscars can say!
How about hoary, pigt
aily, brontosaurian, rusty-dusty, mossy-backed, or square-toed? If so, then you belong with us! Each of these terms were once synonyms for Antiquarian, according to AAS’s recently acquired copy of the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. A recent New York Times article described the historical thesaurus: “Archaism, it turns out, is the point of the H.T.O.E.D., which includes outmoded words as well as contemporary ones and indicates when words came into and fell out of use.” Now archaism is an area we Antiquarians know something about.
Putting aside the unfortunate acronym (which sounds like a close linguistic sibling to “square-toed”), the H.T.O.E.D. is like sticky candy for anyone interested in words and history. The nutritive value may be hazy, but once you tear into it you may get stuck. If you’re the kind of person who spends hours browsing through the original O.E.D., be forewarned: the historical thesaurus version is at least as addictive. Not only do you get the birth-dates of words we use today, this O.E.D. 2.0 includes extinct words and their exact death-date when known.
On one of our recent snowy days, when the reading room inside was as silent as the street outside, I opened the H.T.O.E.D. up. In the section on oldness/ancientness (or number 01.05.06.08.04.04, vol. 1, p. 706, if you’re following along in your H.T.O.E.D.) I found the listing for antiquarian (1610-): one who is interested in oldness/ancientness. Below are some of my favorite gleanings from this section.
Earlier term: antiquary (1586-)
Later terms: man of cabinets (1698), antiquist (1784-), archaist (1851)
An item that is “Antiquarian” could also be described as:
A person who is an “Antiquarian” could also be referred to as:
Between 1828-1864, in colloquial parlance you could antiquarianize, or act as a lover of antiquities. Also, an antiquarium (1881) was a repository that contained antiquities (and all this time, I thought people were just mispronouncing our name!).
What can we take from this lexicographical information? For one thing, at one point in history you could say with some hope of successful communication that: A mumpsimus fogramite antiquarianized his superannuated, pigtaily retardataire items and put them in an antiquarium (although I’m sure I got many parts of speech wrong in that sentence).
Not only can historical terms become nonsensical, they can also twist meanings in interesting and also humorous ways. When I first suggested starting an AAS Glossary, one of Past is Present‘s quick-witted readers posted a hillarious comment about an undergraduate student misinterpreting the term “intercourse” in its eighteenth-century context. She suggested others might have similar stories of historical terms gone awry in a modern context. If you have such stories, please share them.
But historical terminology is not just a funny footnote in history. Names are powerful.
Consider this post a manifesto calling for a whole-hearted embrace of the label Antiquarian in all its mossy-backed glory. It is a name that has stood the test of time. It says we know who we are. We are lovers of the past. We are going to collect it, to preserve it, and to make it accessible to the world. And we are proud of that fact, whether it is fashionable at the moment or not.
So the next time someone walks into the building and asks: “Where are the fish?,” or alternatively wonders what we have against sea life that makes us anti-aquarium, I will proudly explain the history of the term Antiquarian. I will antiquarianize with joy and I invite you to join with me.
After all, the American Rusty-Dusty Society just doesn’t have the same ring, does it?
This is for all the historical comedians out there …
Seeing the illustration above, titled “The Naughty Boy,” in Lauren’s post Slate, Before the Hype started me wondering what led up to this scene. There has to be a good story here. The sulky pout. The curls and the dress (which to modern eyes appear gender-bending). This scene cries out for creative description.
Wow us with your best tag lines and the readers of Past is Present will vote for their favorite (I’ve added a thumbs-up function to the comments section). Keep coming back to vote! Next week we’ll announce the winner of another of our antiquarian-glory-only prizes. And who knows? Maybe we’ll post a few other fun images that have come across our desks recently.
(Check out the results in our later post, The Antiquarian Oscars)
Music religious thoughts inspires,
And kindles in us pure desires;
Gives pleasure to a well-tun’d mind,
The most exalted and refin’dMusic the coldest heart can warm,
The hardest melt, the fiercest charm;
Disarm the savage of his rage,
Dispel our cares, and pains assuage:With joy it can our souls inspire,
And tune our tempers to the lyre;
Our passions like the notes agree,
And stand subdu’d by harmony.
~ from Select Psalms and Hymns for the use of Mr. Adgate’s Pupils
These verses serve as part of an introduction to a hymnal produced in Philadelphia in 1787. The rhetoric regarding music’s affective power is familiar – music soothing the savage beast – but its use here further highlights the many roles that sacred music filled in early America. In addition to rousing religious devotion, music was supposed to uplift the spirit, please the mind, and bring diverse forces into harmony. It was both art and science, duty and offering, individual and communal, education and entertainment, transcendent and easy.
Music was also a commodity. Music instruction books had been published in the colonies from early in the eighteenth century, although the tunebook proper is usually traced to James Lyon’s Urania of 1760. 
Tunebooks were increasingly published locally or regionally, sometimes for use by a particular group or traveling singing master. They were oblong in format, neatly holding one or two psalm tunes per page. Most followed a pattern of prefatory material, introductory explanations of musical knowledge (often called “rudiments”), and repertoire, which may be further divided according to difficulty. Credit for the first sacred music book set in type in America goes to the press of Christoph Saur, and by century’s end the majority of sacred music publications were printed from type while the more expensive engraving process was generally reserved for secular sheet music.
Friends of AAS may not be surprised to know that Isaiah Thomas recognized the potential of sacred music, even though he described himself as “unskilled in musick.” He was editor and publisher of the influential The Worcester Collection, which went to eight editions from 1786 to 1803. Thomas writes of his own motivation for entering the sacred music scene in the Collection’s preface:
Having observed
with pleasure the attention paid to Church Musick, by most classes of people in the New-England States, and knowing many of the books now in use, necessarily high-charged, owing to their being printed from Copper-plates, he was induced both by inclination, and at the request of several friends to attempt a work of this kind from types; hoping to afford it somewhat cheaper than any other book of its bigness printed after the usual manner.
Thomas proved accurate in his claims; Karl Kroeger, who wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on The Worcester Collection, cites it as the first mass market tunebook publication due to its reduced cost and repertoire selected to appeal to a broad audience. The process of printing also aided in this pursuit, since the repertoire could change with every edition to keep up with new developments and user feedback. Perhaps we should suggest music as business venture as a suitable verse to add to the lofty sentiments above.
Ursula Crosslin is a Ph.D. Candidate in Musicology at Ohio State University. She was awarded a 2009-10 Reese Fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society to research her project: “The Institution of the American Church Choir in Philadelphia, 1760-1860.”
Further reading: Karl Douglas Kroeger, “The Worcester Collection of Sacred Harmony and Sacred Music in America, 1786-1803” (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1977).
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 not listed in our catalog. And although I usually check the Library of Congress’s authority file to see if the firm is established, I went right to Google. When I found nothing solid there, I went to the newspapers. For the record, they are already established at LC, but it did prove an interesting distraction from cataloging. And it turns out the lithograph had a Worcester connection.
The view of Portland was copyrighted by the firm of Clohessy & Stengele (i.e. Strengele). So I checked the names America’s Historical Newspapers database (a wonderful research tool containing full-text searchable, digital versions of many of the newspapers at AAS). I searched for Stengele and Clohessy in any paper and any publishing date. The first result that came up was from the September 17, 1894 issue of the Morning Olympian. The headline read:
Portland’s tragedy. A murder and suicide of prominent people. It was unrequited love. A civil engineer shoots a woman.
John W. Strengele was a thirty-something well known civil engineer from a wealthy family in Chicago, who had moved to Portland about 1889. He had been dating a woman, Mrs. Mabel Colvin of Worcester. Yes, Mrs. Pretty scandalous I thought. According to the first news report on September 17th, 1894, Mr. Strengele and Mrs. Colvin had been dating for some time and had decided to be married, once she obtained a divorce from her husband in Worcester. Even more insight into this tragedy was given in the reprint of Strengele’s suicide note addressed to his business parter:
Portland Hotel, September 16, 1894. My dear Clohessy: Could anyone overlook the fact that I am mad? I have done a lot of worrying, and you can now see why I am not well and why I do not eat and sleep as I used to. You know we were to be married as soon as Mabel got her divorce, and you know of our intimacy for the past year or more. I found to my sorrow after watching her that I was not the only man in the case. We had a row once before, but then I was not as positive as now, and we made up. You have proved the only friend I have ever had. I hope you will never make such a d— f— of yourself as I have made of myself. I cannot stand life any longer, although I have been fairly successful all along. There is enough money in my pocket to pay for burial, etc. I am not particular how I am put away. Mabel is the only woman I really love. I cannot live without her, and if you knew how I have been treated of late you would not blame me.
It is almost impossible for me to write I am so nervous. I realize what I am about to do perfectly, and I cannot for the life of me check myself. This desire to kill her and then myself came over me a few days ago. I cannot live any longer. Best wishes. Jack.
According to more newspaper reports from Portland and Worcester, Mabel Forehand Colvin was the daughter of Sullivan Colvin, owner of the Forehand Arms Company in Worcester. Mabel had married another prominent Worcesterite, Mr. C. Henry Colvin, a bookkeeper at the Colvin Iron Foundry, sometime around 1885. According to some reports, Mabel was an alcoholic and moved to Portland about 1892 to flee her unhappy marriage. Other reports stated that Mr. Colvin was at fault and had verbally abused and abandoned his wife. She left and moved in with her cousins, the Jewetts, on Yamhill Street in Portland. Her brother Charles also lived in Portland. Soon after, Mabel met and fell for John Strengele, a prominent civil engineer. They later became engaged and Mabel had filed for divorce just days before her death. In some reports, and in the suicide note, it seemed Mabel had cooled on the relationship and was seen with other men, which obviously upset Strengele. The account in Worcester’s Daily Spy of September 18, gives the gruesome account of exactly what happened on Sunday, September 16, 1894:
Sunday Mrs. Colvin attended church as usual and taught her class at the Unitarian Church. After Sunday school she took a walk with her brother, Chas. E. Forehand, who recently went to Oregon. After enjoying an hour’s pleasant chat with her brother, Mrs. Colvin boarded a streetcar to go to her home at 472 Yamhill Street [near Thirteenth Street], where she lived with her cousin, C.F. Jewett. From the car to Mr. Jewett’s house, the distance is not above 200 feet, and, after alighting from the car the unfortunate woman started to walk toward the home she was never destined to reach.
Stanegels [sic] was lying in wait for his victim. He rushed to her side, caught her by the arm and spoke excitedly and hurriedly. A man who stood on the opposite side of the street saw Stanegels and heard the excited tones of his voice but could not distinguish his words. Mrs. Colvin exclaimed sharply ‘Let go of me. I do not care to be molested by you; I will not go with you.’
These were the last words she ever uttered, for Stanegels pulled out a revolver and fired. Mrs. Colvin fell to the ground with a moan and the crazed murderer, while the woman was lying prostrate on the street with the blood streaming from the wound caused by the first bullet crashing through the brain of Mrs. Colvin, the bullet entering the left temple and passing out through the right ear. Stanegels then looked closely at his victim, apparently to make sure that he had accomplished his murderous purpose, placed the pistol muzzle to his own right temple and sent a bullet through his own head, literally blowing out his brains. He fell dead to the ground within five feet of his victim.
Images of the deceased from the 9/17/1894 issue of the Morning Oregonian
Once Mabel’s Portland family learned of the murder, they sent the following telegram to her father, Sullivan Forehand, who had never heard of Mr. Strengele (Sullivan and his wife had visited her months before her death, and the vacation had been written about in the local paper):
Mabel accidentally killed. Will be prepared suitably for shipment. Details by mail. Wire me instructions.
Mabel was shipped back to Worcester, given a proper funeral, and is buried at the Rural Cemetery on Grove Street in Worcester. Her brother, Frederic, had a relationship with the American Antiquarian Society and donated and sold several manuscript collections to us in the 1920s. So, even though I should have checked the authority file first, I’m glad I didn’t, since establishing authorities is rarely as interesting as this story was. I’m just upset I didn’t get to include this information in their file!
March 1, 2010 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of the pianist composer Frédéric François Chopin (1810-1849). Chopin was born near Warsaw and lived much of his short life in France so you may be asking yourself why on earth there is a post about him on the blog of the American Antiquarian Society. Last week, after hearing a NPR story about the concerts and events marking Chopin’s birth, how most of him is buried in Paris but his heart is in a shrine in Warsaw, how his music is closely associated with the Romantic movement, etc., etc., I initiated a discussion behind the reference desk over whether or not Chopin was as revered during his lifetime here in the United States as he was in Europe. There were several ways to find out, we decided, and so we split up to dig through the stacks and our on-line resources to see what we could find.
A search of the American sheet music collection turned up numerous examples of Chopin’s works, including some which, according to resident music expert Andrew Bourque, had been simplified for more amateur players. Most are lithographed scores and it is interesting to note that the composer began his career just as the sheet music industry was switching from engraving to lithography as the preferred mode of reproduction and distribution of music. All of the songs in our collection were printed in the United States, and most date from just after the composer’s death or later, so this evidence certainly supported the fact that Chopin had a following here in the latter portion of the century. But what about during his lifetime, when he was entertaining the elite of Europe?
The print collection turned up two portraits of Chopin, both dating from after his death at the young age of thirty-nine. 
These images indicate that the lithographers of New York and Philadelphia thought there was a market for images of the Romantic musician, but it doesn’t tell us what the composer’s reception might have been here before 1849. A check of other institutional holdings of prints supports this – with most of the American images of Chopin dating from after 1850. A quick check of the nation’s painted and sculptural holdings indexed by the Smithsonian American Inventories Resource (http://sirismm.si.edu/siris/aboutari.htm) revealed only five busts of Chopin, all from after 1900. For comparison, Beethoven returned nearly forty results, many from the nineteenth century.
What else? The first biography of Chopin published in the United States was a translation of Liszt’s 1852 biography, printed in Boston and Philadelphia in the 1860s. Concert programs and broadsides in the Society’s holdings list performers playing his work in the 1850s (listing him third, after Beethoven and Mozart, not too shabby!). Andrew checked periodicals and turned up an article about Chopin published in April of 1850 in the New York periodical The eclectic magazine of foreign literature, science, and art. The article was reprinted from a London magazine, so the content has a very European slant, but the fact that the lengthy article found an audience here is still interesting.
Reference assistant Ashley Cataldo went digging in the on-line resources and found a wonderful 1988 article on the American transcendental critic Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) and her response to the music scene in Boston during the 1840s. Writing for the New-York Daily Tribune in January of 1846, Fuller commented on the upcoming U.S. debut concert of the European pianist Julian Fontana (1810-1869). She hoped that his playing would translate, “the fire and sweep of Liszt, the architectural majesty of Thalberg, and the tenderness and delicate fancy of Chopin” (Quoted in Ora Frishberg Saloman, “Margaret Fuller on Musical Life in Boston and New York, 1841-1846,” American Music, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Winter, 1988), pp. 428-441, p. 437). Ah, now we have something concrete. Chopin’s music was certainly being played and heard in America during his lifetime and, at least according to the worldly Fuller, he was a force on the level of Franz Liszt and Sigismond Thalberg.
Additionally, Ashley located several 1845 advertisements in the Boston Daily Atlas for Oliver Ditson’s music shop in Boston which include references to Chopin’s songs being sold. A broadside published c. 1844 for competing music dealer John Ashton & Co., also of Boston, lists Chopin’s songs being sold with other “foreign” tunes. So Chopin’s music was available for sale before his death in multiple shops in Boston.
So what did we learn from our little exercise? Probably those in the know, like Fuller and the music store owners, were aware of Chopin and maybe even understood his dawning influence on piano music during this period. We know that after the young composer’s death his music became widely available and his image begins to circulate in this country. He was not, apparently, the “rock star” personality that he was in Europe, as his work is not mentioned in the wider press nor is there much information on his unconventional personal life (I’d love to be a fly on the wall with George Sands and Margaret Fuller in the same room — anyone else?). In contrast, the British and French press tracked the composer’s travels, commented frequently on his reclusive nature, and noted the scandals associated with Sands later novels and her relationship with Chopin. Americans were not so focused on Chopin until much later.
Here in the States, his work is just starting to be widely played in the late 1850s, right before the Civil War. And during the war, he pretty much disappears, understandably, until the 1870s. It is hard to imagine his soft, complex, romantic music competing with the blast of cannon fire and sometimes shrill patriotic tunes that were flooding the ears of Americans from 1858 to 1865. His nocturnes and etudes would have seemed very foreign and very far removed.
What do we think about when we think about the history of the book in the U.S. South (for those of us prone to think about such things, that is)? It is received wisdom that the South was much less industrialized than the North in the first half of the nineteenth century. And, if print was one of those areas of production that was subject to increasing industrialization, it must follow that there was less printed matter in the South: fewer books and newspapers, and consequently also fewer writers and readers.
Instead (so the story goes), the South was reliant on the expansion of distribution networks by northern publishing houses, particularly in Philadelphia and Cincinnati. The result is an image of a regional print culture that depended on a select set of texts produced in another region while it studiously shunned other texts (no abolitionist pamphlets, please—their prohibition was the goal of the 1835 Abolition Postal Campaign). The end result was a world of print that, by the time of the Civil War, was stunted in its growth. In fact, Southern newspaper publishers were spurred by the paper shortages caused by the war to resort to such outlandish solutions as printing newspapers on the back of patterned wallpaper, as in this May 1863 issue of the Weekly Junior Register of Franklin, Louisiana in the collection of the American Antiquarian Society.
But is this actually true? Or, put more broadly, what happens when we view the imagined community of U.S. print culture from the vantage point of the South? This is the animating question behind this year’s American Antiquarian Society Summer Seminar in the History of the Book in American Culture, “The Global American South and Early American Print Culture,” to be held from June 14-18 at the AAS. While AAS is often thought of as a northeastern archive, our holdings—which are national in scope—offer tremendously rich resources for the study of print culture in the global South, including not just materials from the United States, but also from the Caribbean and Latin America. The seminar will rely in particular on the Society’s Edward Larocque Tinker Collection of Louisiana Literature and History.
This year’s seminar will explore how a reoriented book history that looks at U.S. print culture from the south might challenge and inform emerging transatlantic, transnational, and cosmopolitan histories of the United States. How did a region that asserted its “American-ness” while insisting on a distinctive sectional identity appear in the world of print, and how did it engage with the wider world through the realm of print culture? How did book distribution, authorship, reading, censorship, and copyright work to shape lived experience in the South? Throughout the week, we hope to use the riches of the AAS collections to uncover some of the ways that print culture in the South was different from that in the North—wallpaper newspapers!—as well as some of the things that they had in common (as shown in the two booksellers’ ads below).
The seminar will be led by Jeannine DeLombard and Lloyd Pratt. DeLombard is Associate Professor of English and Acting Director of the Centre for the Study of the U.S. at the University of Toronto. Pratt is Assistant Professor of English and African-American Studies at Michigan State University. Advanced graduate students, college and university faculty, librarians, and independent scholars are encouraged to apply. The deadline for applications is March 12, 2010. Details and application forms are available here.
It’s a good news / bad news situation.
For those of you who were not going to be able to attend Ezra Greenspan’s lecture tonight, the good news is his talk on “Researching and Writing African American Biography: The Life of William Wells Brown” has been postponed to Thursday, April 22. And for those who were planning to come tonight, we hope you’ll be able to make this new date. Same time, same place, same compelling subject and speaker, you’ll just have more time to free up your calendars. We hope to see you then!
More information is available on AAS’s website at http://www.americanantiquarian.org/publicpro.htm.
In the cold of a New England winter, it is easy to feel sorry for one’s self as the grey clouds of January barely dissipate in the low light of February’s early gloam. Some believe that the best way to tackle winter is to embrace it, and so the Graphic Arts department offers for your enjoyment selections from the collection that reflect how our ancestors dealt with the snow and ice of winter by singing, sleighing and skating. We chose optimistic images on purpose – leaving the broadsides and songs about blizzards and frostbite and lost cattle for another day!
Today’s university may be in need of a revolution of its own, what with its failure to create true interdisciplinary conv
ersation and its isolation from the wider public. The late eighteenth-century college did not exist in such isolation from the people, though few colleges became hotbeds of revolutionary activity during the war like Queen’s College (now Rutgers University). Queen’s alone attracted soldiers and aspiring legislators like James Schureman and Simeon DeWitt. It also brought to its doors printers like Abraham Blauvelt, whose newspapers became a voice for a unique type of independence, one that linked printing and university life, in the later years of the eighteenth century.
Blauvelt has a small, unexceptional entry in the printers’ file: publisher of the Brunswick Gazette from 1789-1792; publisher, with Shelly Arnett, of the Guardian, from 1792-1793; graduate of Queen’s in 1789 and recipient of the A.M. in 1792. These well-chosen facts of Avis Clarke’s, though, provide a window into the early American world of education and independence.
Every Wednesday, a notice for trustee meetings would appear in Blauvelt’s paper, The Brunswick Gazette. Not just a sign of loyalty from a Queen’s College alumnus, the notices are a sign of the change in allegiance on the part of trustees themselves. On June 5, 1781, the Legislature of New Jersey altered the charter for Queen’s by request of its own trustees, now fully in support of independence under their soon-to-be president Jacob Hardenbergh. Trustees would now take an oath of allegiance to the United States instead of to the board itself. More significantly, though, the new charter stipulated that notices for trustee meetings be published in a New York or New Jersey paper, not just a New York paper alone.
One of the last colonies to get its own paper was New Jersey. Because of its dependence on New York and Pennsylvania, New Jersey did not get its own major paper, the New-Jersey Journal, until 1779. Published by Sheppard Kollock, it was one of the first papers in support of independence in the state. In 1783, Kollock had published The Political Intelligencer and New Jersey Advertiser with Shelly Arnett, Blauvelt’s partner at the Guardian ten years later. Kollock published the first independent newspaper in New Jersey, and he Arnett printed the first newspaper with a college imprint. Blauvelt in turn printed one of the first papers to help establish independence both for the New Jersey press, Queen’s College trustees, and loyalty to a new United States.
Further reference: Demarest, William H.S. A History of Rutgers College, 1766-1924. New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1924. Hixson, Richard F. The Press in Revolutionary New Jersey. Trenton: New Jersey Historical Commission, 1975. McAnear, Beverly. “College Founding in the American Colonies, 1745-1775” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 42, no. 1 (1955): 24-44.
