“A Lot of Handsome Badges”: A New Illustrated Inventory

AAS collects American printed materials of all kinds, including multiple types of ephemera, from broadsides to tickets to ribbon badges. We have recently completed an illustrated inventory of the Society’s collection of more than 170 ribbon badges, ranging in date from 1824 to 1900. The inventory includes ribbons worn during political campaigns and civic events ...

New Illustrated Inventory: Photographs of North American Indians, 1850-1900

Today, the American Antiquarian Society is launching a new illustrated inventory featuring photographs of Native Americans from our graphic arts collection. This collection of 225 photographs spans from 1859 to 1910 and makes available photographs of members of thirty-nine tribes. The collection was compiled as a resource decades ago, long before the creation of the ...

Unique Jacksoniana: An Extra-Illustrated Life

An earlier blog post mentioned that work was underway on an online resource about the Jacksonian Era at AAS featuring highlights from the William C. Cook Jacksonian Era collection. To whet your appetite in the weeks leading up to its debut we will be telling you about a few one-of-a-kind items from that collection. Today ...

Show the Love: McLoughlin Christmas Books

One year from now AAS will be opening the exhibition Radiant with Color and Light: McLoughlin Brothers and the Business of Picture Books, 1858-1920 at the Grolier Club in New York. The show will feature nearly two hundred books, games, watercolors, toys, and ephemera, all produced by the McLoughlin Bros. firm and their contemporaries. The ...

The Many Faces of the Headless Horseman: Illustrations of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”

Portrait of Washington Irving in The Drawing-Room Scrap Book (Philadelphia, 1850), engraved by J. Sartain after a painting by Gilbert Stuart Newton.

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 ...

Much Revere-d

Past is Present is taking a short break from our series of Adopt-a-Book posts to tell you about our favorite new resource on the AAS website. Some of us at AAS embark upon irrevocable and unusual quests – like creating the “perfect” inventory. While, arguably, it is an impossible task to encompass everyone’s inventory-needs, the Graphic Arts ...