What comes to mind when you hear “Sleepy Hollow”? A dark, windy night, a mysterious horseman who just happens to have no head, a terrified Ichabod Crane fleeing for his life—no matter in what form you first come to know “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” there are certain dramatic elements the story always seems to ...
This past April, AAS received a plain brown envelope via U.S. Mail, with no return address. The envelope was carefully opened by our Acquisitions staff and two folded broadsides were found inside. There was no note included, no inscriptions or marks on the broadsides, and, as luck would have it, there was not even a ...
When I started working at AAS nine years ago, I did not know much about American prints and printmaking. Lithography and engraving were never the focus of my art history classes. And I only knew Currier & Ives from the prints my mother had hanging in every room in the house, and they were not ...
This past winter, while hunting in the stacks for a trade card for a reader, I spotted this intriguing advertisement for chewing gum. As editor of the Society’s Instagram account, I had been participating in an event called #bugginout, which featured posts by libraries around the world focused on illustrations of anthropomorphic insects. These posts ...
I was working at the reference desk recently, when our sharp-eyed library assistant Daniel Boudreau brought to my attention a volume that had crossed the desk the previous day. A scholar researching the American newspaper publisher Horace Greeley had requested the item, which was a fully illustrated book made with lithographic images and text. Dan ...
The American Antiquarian Society has an extensive collection of pre-1800 American bookplates, with representative examples engraved by famous patriots like Paul Revere, or commissioned by founding fathers such as George Washington (left). AAS founder, Isaiah Thomas, had two different bookplates made by Revere and AAS, of course, has several examples of each ( below). These ...
In the same vein as last year’s ghostly stereocards blog post, we offer another Halloween treat for you! Have you thought about sending someone a light-fright this October? If you’ve been in any stationary or card aisle recently, you would notice most holidays serve as an excuse to send a greeting. Although conservative in number ...
Recently, AAS purchased two photographs depicting American newspaper printers, one on eBay and the other at a local auction in central Massachusetts. These images capture working men posed in photographic studios, holding props and tools of the trade. When viewed with two additional photographs already in the collection, these portraits capture the likenesses of people ...
Josiah Burden is a history teacher at Worcester's South High Community School. Over the course of several years, he was able to take part in many workshops at AAS through a federally-funded Teaching American History grant awarded to AAS and the Worcester Public Schools. The experience led him to bring two of his own U.S. ...
Benjamin Franklin. New York: J. Dalton, for the New York Albion, ca. 1860. Large format engravings were distributed in several ways in pre-Civil War America. They could be ordered from a publisher by subscription, purchased directly through book and print dealers, or awarded as premiums for membership in an organization, such as the American Art Union. Many ...
It’s an age-old question: What is the way to a woman’s heart? (It’s also a timely question, with Mother’s Day this coming weekend.) We often hear the way to a man’s heart is food, beer, or sports. To a woman’s, it’s usually said that it’s chocolate, jewelry, clothing, or shoes. If we dig a little ...
The Bookbinders Shop. Philadelphia: P.S. Duval for the American Sunday School Union, ca. 1850. This image of the interior of the British bookbinding establishment of Westleys & Clark was issued by the Philadelphia lithographer P.S. Duval sometime between 1842 and 1850. A second, related print showing a ship and its furniture was printed by Duval using the same bordered ...
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 ...
Last week, about twenty AAS catalogers, research fellows, curators, and other staff members gathered to discuss the challenges that come with transforming the visual code of an image into a written code. The creation of metadata in the form of indexing images is an inexact science, and it is one challenge that faces us as ...
We know how to keep busy in the dead of winter here at the American Antiquarian Society. In late 2012 Patricia Johnston, the Professor Rev. J. Gerard Mears, S.J. chair in fine arts at the College of the Holy Cross, approached AAS with the idea of having one of her Holy Cross classes research and ...
