The American Antiquarian Society already preserves over four million books, newspapers, graphics and manuscripts, but new acquisitions are still being added to the collection every month. How are newly acquired collection materials made accessible to researchers in the AAS reading room? This post examines the detailed process by which AAS staff acquire, receive, process, pay ...
Clark, B. (Benjamin), Sen. The Past, Present and Future in Prose and Poetry. Toronto: Adam, Stevenson, & Co., 1867. BIB #565812 Benjamin Clark was born to emancipated African American parents in Maryland in 1801, and he died in Detroit in 1864. He married, had ten children, and lived with his family in Pennsylvania. He also established ...
Cinderella. Triumph edition. Philadelphia: B. Wilmsen, ca. 1880. Bib ID: 604082. The now-obscure Philadelphia publisher B. Wilmsen published this pop-up version of Cinderella enhanced by cut tissue paper as part of his Triumph edition series, which featured fairy tales including Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretel. Although Wilmsen held the American copyright, the book was actually ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
On August 28, 2020, author Amy Hildreth Chen was a featured guest at the Virtual Book Talk series sponsored by the Program in the History of the Book in American Culture (PHBAC). Amy spoke about her recent publication, Placing Papers: The American Literary Archives Market, published in June 2020 by the University of Massachusetts Press. ...
Staff at AAS have been sad and frustrated about Covid-19’s effects on our researchers, fellows, and fellow cultural institutions. Despite this hardship, we’ve been able to find some joy in our days and to feel connected to the collections we love by working on a staff-wide transcription of the first AAS donation book. For those of ...
