Within the scope of the Historic Children's Voices Project, the term ‘printed juvenilia’ is used to describe books or pamphlets written and/or printed by children and youth under the age of twenty. These include items that were written by children and youth but printed professionally by adults. In some cases, the printer was an adult family member; for examples, see The King's Daughter by eight-year-old Grace Fisher Coolidge that was printed by her father George, or The White Horse by Bertha Johnston that was printed by her uncle William Owens. This category of professionally printed juvenilia also includes pieces written by children and youth that were edited by adults and published professionally, as in the case of anthologies such as The Voice of the Young and Apples of Gold, in Pictures of Silver. Both contain pieces written by public school students that were selected by their teachers for publication.
The second category of juvenilia are books and pamphlets written and printed by children and youth, often called amateur books. The amateur press came into being with the invention of table-top presses like the Lowe and Novelty presses that were patented beginning in the late 1850s. These small table-top presses ranged in price from anywhere between $12 to $30 (equivalent to $300 to $740 today), so this technology was within the economic reach of middle- and upper-class youth. Many amateur books were sold for as little as 10 cents a copy; they were frequently produced by young people who also edited and printed monthly amateur newspapers that sold as subscriptions for between 10 and 25 cents annually.
By the 1870s, an entire network of hundreds of amateur journalists and writers had formed a community, holding conventions around the country where they could meet each other and exchange equipment, printed books, and newspapers. Because of this network, it was not unusual for the contents of an amateur book to be written by one party and printed by another amateur journalist living in a different state. For example, the comic story A Little Game was written by seventeen-year-old Buffalo amateur journalist Adeline Knapp and printed by eighteen-year-old Zander Snyder of Vienna, New Jersey. Because adults do not mediate these amateur books, they can provide a clear window into the desires, fantasies, aspirations, and views expressed by young people living in late nineteenth-century America.
The American Antiquarian Society has one of the largest institutional collections of amateur newspapers; many of them are accessible through the digital product Amateur Newspapers from the American Antiquarian Society.