Dated Books and Dated Pamphlets
When, in 1813, Isaiah Thomas enumerated classes of
materials
suitable for deposit in the Society's fledgling library, he listed
primus inter pares books, pamphlets, and magazines, "especially
those which were early printed either in South or in North
America." Ever since, Thomas's mandate has been so assiduously
carried out that the Society's collection of books and pamphlets
"early printed" in British North America has grown into the largest
such collection anywhere in the world. In addition to works
printed in the thirteen colonies that became the United States, and
in the United States themselves and their territories, the
collection includes smaller numbers of Bermudian, Canadian, and
British and French West Indian imprints.
The books and pamphlets in the Society's collection touch on
every subject of importance in American history, life, and letters
through the year 1820, and on every trivial subject as well. The
products of big city and small town presses from Abingdon,
Maryland, to Zanesville, Ohio, are represented, as are all the
ideas for which printers or authors imagined there to be a market,
or at least a thirst, in their neighborhood, state, or nation.
The collection is now known by two names, "Dated Books" and
"Dated Pamphlets" which reflect discrete shelving arrangements. It
comprises approximately 35,000 items that were printed before 1821.
This number does not include any almanacs or broadsides, nor does
it include all of the Society's pre-1821 American books and
pamphlets. (Certain materials are held in the Reserve and Bindings
Collections
and in the collections of state and federal documents.)
Until 1974 the Society for practical reasons tended to define
"early" as "before 1821," thus following the lead established by
the chronological limits of 1821-61 in Orville Roorbach's
Bibliotheca Americana (1852-61) and the 1639-1820 projected scope
of Charles Evans's American Bibliography (1903-34). In 1974 the
Society redefined "Dated Books and Dated Pamphlets" to include
works printed "before 1831." Several thousand pamphlets, 1821-30, were
added to the Dated Pamphlets collection before this policy was abandoned
in
1989.
From 1927 until 1970, the Society's early American imprints
were cataloged by Avis G. Clarke. Miss Clarke's authoritative
author, title, subject, and added entry cataloging for over 100,
000 of these books was published by the Society in 1971 as A
Dictionary Catalogue of American Books Pertaining to the 17th through
19th Centuries: Library of the American Antiquarian Society (20
vols., Westport, Conn.). Miss Clarke also produced files of cards
for these books arranged by date of printing, by name of printer,
and by place of printing. The printers' files includes cards that
synopsize each printer's career; these cards are backed up by
"printer authority cards," which list the sources, ranging from
contemporary newspapers to modern genealogies, for all information
given in the printers' file. These files
were not published with the Dictionary Catalogue, but are
accessible in the reading room to all who use the Society's
collections in person. The new machine-readable database of highly
detailed bibliographical information on all pre-1801 North American
books and pamphlets is available online both at AAS and at all
member institutions of the Research Libraries Group through RLIN.
For more information on this database, see the sections in this
book on catalogs and arrangements of collections and cataloging
programs.
All but a small number of the Society's pre-1820 Dated Books
and Dated Pamphlets have been reproduced in microform as the
largest part of the Readex Microprint-AAS Early American
Imprints series.
These two series, Evans 1640-1800 and Shaw-Shoemaker 1801-
1819, are held by several hundred college, university, and independent
research libraries in the United States, Canada, and abroad.
Information on obtaining this series is available at the Readex
website.
Cataloging records for the Shaw-Shoemaker series are available
online through RLIN and OCLC; records for the Evans series are
available through RLIN, or may be purchased from the Society by a
library for incorporation into its own machine-readable catalog.
Because the Society has made photographic reproductions of the
complete texts of its early American imprints available to scholars
worldwide, use of the originals is now limited to scholars engaged
in specific kinds of research. This policy is part of the
Society's commitment to ensure that the fragile originals of all
documents in its collections will be available for inspection
generations hence.
- by Keith Arbour, former Head of Readers' Services, and Alan
N. Degutis, Head of Cataloging; updated by Alan N. Degutis
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Evans Digital Edition
(1639-1800)
Readex, a division of Newsbank, in cooperation with the American
Antiquarian Society has released the first unit of
Evans Digital Edition, an Internet-accessible version of
Early American Imprints, Series I Evans (1639-1800).
The collection
was
begun in 1955, when AAS launched a project to reproduce in microprint
every extant book,
pamphlet, and broadside printed in America from 1639-1800.
For current information on the cataloging status of this and
other AAS collections, choose "Collection Access" below.
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