The Society’s collection of photographs of working print shops continues to expand (see blog posts on this topic from 2014 and 2017). Most of the photographs feature businesses in New England, New York, or Pennsylvania. This newly acquired photo, showing a tidy shop with a ca. 1882 Hoe flatbed newspaper press, was taken in Nebraska. ...
Long-time readers of the AAS blog know we have posted frequently here about Worcester-area photographer, Theodore C. Wohlbrück (1879-1936). We’ve been writing about the Society’s holdings of this artist’s work since 2010. AAS has a large collection. of photographic prints and glass plate negatives taken by Wohlbrück between 1900 and ca. 1910, including regional landscapes, ...
My favorite part of cataloging is figuring out a mystery. When little information is given with an object and I am able to solve that mystery, I’m a happy camper. So when a set of three photographs came across my desk, one of them a very sweet image of children holding rabbits and chickens, I ...
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 ...
Back in 2014, I prepared a post for Past is Present that featured four photographs of newspaper print shops, two from the collection and two recently acquired. In the three years since that post, AAS has added several more occupational images featuring print shops of all shapes and sizes. These images add to our knowledge of the ...
Earlier this year the American Antiquarian Society acquired an important archive of manuscripts and drawings related to American missionary activity in Western Africa. The collection tells the story of a couple, Emily Griswold (1838-1906) and her eventual husband, Benjamin Hartley (1838-1912). Emily was the daughter of the poet and publisher Rufus Wilmot Griswold, who edited anthologies, ...
Those of you who follow the Society's blog are aware that the last week in April was Preservation Week, a period set aside by the American Libraries Association to focus on the care and conservation of collections material.
We take preservation seriously at AAS. The word is part of our core mission, in fact. We have ...
Photograph Album. [1863-1866].
This album of over 150 cartes-de-visite images of American prints illustrates the methods used to distribute images in the nineteenth century. Many of the photographs were made by John B. Soule. Soule worked with lithographers, such as J. H. Bufford, to reproduce popular lithographed images of children, attractive women, kittens, and comical ...
Hollis Jubal Haven with American flag, tintype, 1861; Unidentified Civil War soldier with bayonet, ambrotype; and Albertina Haven Revere, tintype.
Occasionally AAS visitors bring along objects they wish to donate to the Society. This autumn we had several visits from Dr. Christian W. Aussenheimer, a Worcester resident with connections to the Haven and Hoar families. ...
Today we continue a series of blog posts highlighting items from our upcoming Adopt-a-Book event, slated for Tuesday, March 29, 2011, at 6PM in Antiquarian Hall. You can read the entire Adopt-a-Book 2011 catalog on the AAS website, where you will find descriptions of all 176 items up for adoption this year.
Our fifth featured ...
When a new technology comes along, like the iPad or the Kindle, human consumers are naturally fascinated. We admire our colleague’s new-found technological abilities; we test the gadgets in the stores; we read about them in the press. Some among us predict the end of older technologies. Others scoff and stick with the tried and ...
The ongoing processing of the Society’s Group Photograph collection has recently turned up a small cache of nineteenth-century photographs of librarians. Oh sure, there are also significant photographs of mill workers, school children, and important businessmen, but around here we get pretty jazzed up over images of librarians. On the whole, librarians tend to be ...
Recently, the American Antiquarian Society digitized a new finding aid to help scholars access the Society’s Group Photograph collection (http://www.americanantiquarian.org/groupphotos.htm). Usually, we like these finding aides to be as complete as possible, with detailed entries and scans -- you know, the whole works, like we have done for our collections of daguerreotypes, ambrotypes and tintypes. ...
Here at AAS we have lots of small collections that are safely tucked away, accessible only due to the knowledge of the reference staff, catalogers, or curators who bump into them occasionally when searching for other things. As we work our way through our holdings we try to increase access to these “lost” collections ...
