It doesn’t stop with “Antiquarian…” or, I’ll take what’s behind door number one!

Blog post 1 001

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 ...

Are you Rip-Van-Winkleish?

antiquarian

How about hoary, pigtaily, 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 ...

Call for Co-editors for an AAS Glossary

booksnake

The American Antiquarian Society is almost 200 years old. I guess that's not entirely shocking, given that "Antiquarian" is in our name, but sometimes it's easy to forget that when we were founded there were no functional steam-locomotives, no sewing machines, no modern matches.  Napoleon was still fighting his way across Europe.  Even "The Star-Spangled ...