Continuing the Conversation: Amy Hildreth Chen Answers Your Questions on the Literary Archives Market

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.  ...

No Permission Required: Exploring and Using Our Digital Collections

b-w primer

Policy changes frequently will fall under the un-glamorous category. But we are hoping that our newest one will fall under the hooray-for-AAS tally marking. When books have included images from our collection, we’ve been providing photographic reproductions and permission to use them in the form of a licensing agreement; I’ve signed a few (read: thousand) of ...

Copyright and the Beginnings of Photography

As a Jay and Deborah Last Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society, I was excited to find a wealth of material related to my dissertation on photography and intellectual property law.  The United States Constitution pledged “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing, for limited Times, to Authors and Inventors the ...

The Tempest Over “The Baby’s Opera”

Nineteenth-century American publisher McLoughlin Brothers pioneered the use of chromolithography in the production of color picture books starting in the 1860s.  Until that point, most children’s books were illustrated with wood engravings that were locked into the printing press form along with set type.  Coloring these images generally entailed using hand-colored stencils or employing a ...

Fraud Week, Part 4: Downright Theft–or is it?

If we’re to believe iconic popular culture films like Christian Slater’s 1990 Pump Up the Volume, media and information pirates act as heroic rebels fighting an overbearing FCC and even more overbearing parents.  If we’re to believe historians like Adrian Johns, author of the recently published Piracy and Death of a Pirate, piracy has fostered ...