AAS draws not only on its traditional resources as a center of bibliographical research and as a matchless repository of early American printed materials, but also on recent intellectual currents that look at the history of books and other printed objects in their full economic, social, and cultural context.
History of the Book
|
The Who and What of American Print Culture in the 1700s | In this video, Elizabeth Watts Pope, the Society’s curator of books and digital collections, introduces who was involved in American colonial printing and what kinds of materials they produced. Prepared for The News Media and the Making of America, 1730-1800, the 2021 Teacher Institute held at AAS. |
|
The When and Where of American Print Culture in the 1700s | In this video, Elizabeth Watts Pope, the Society’s curator of books and digital collections, introduces when and where printing began in colonial America and how it developed over the course of the eighteenth century. Prepared for The News Media and the Making of America, 1730-1800, the 2021 Teacher Institute held at AAS. |
|
American Broadsides & Ephemera Before 1800 | In this video, Lauren Hewes, the Society’s vice president for collections, describes the primary printing processes used in the 18th century to create and disseminate visual material, including prints, maps, ephemera, and book and newspaper illustrations. Prepared for The News Media and the Making of America, 1730-1800, the 2021 Teacher Institute held at AAS. |
|
Book Traces: Nineteenth-Century Readers and the Future of the Library | In most college and university libraries, materials published before 1800 have been moved into special collections, while the post-1923 books remain in general circulation. But books published between these dates are vulnerable to deaccessioning; often libraries clear out the duplicates, assuming that circulating copies of any given nineteenth-century edition are essentially identical to one another. When you look closely, however, you see that they are not. |
|
Perspectives from the Collection: The Bay Psalm Book | Join us as we explore the intriguing history of The Whole Book of Psalms, the earliest edition of which dates to 1640. Known as the Bay Psalm Book, it was the first book printed in British North America and an early acquisition made by AAS's founder Isaiah Thomas. This modest volume of metered psalms, meant to be sung during worship services, had many subsequent editions. In 2014, the Society was able to acquire a copy of the also exceedingly rare fourteenth edition, printed in 1709. |
|
Place of Reading: Three Centuries of Reading in America | This exhibition uses images and objects from the AAS collections to illuminate the spaces where reading happened in early America. |
|
Teaching the History of the Book | Scott Casper Jeff Groves |
|
The American Renaissance: Critical and Bibliographical Perspectives | David S. Reynolds, Michael Winship |
|
Book Madness | During the mid-nineteenth century, Americans witnessed the growth of major public, university, and historical society libraries. In her new book Book Madness: A Story of Collectors in America, Denise Gigante brings to life the stories of bibliophiles who assembled these institutions and shaped intellectual life in America during the 1840s. Booksellers, publishers, editors, librarians, journalists, poets, actors, politicians, and even clergymen all hastened to collect books, manuscripts, and other objects related to America's history. |
| A Fatal Resemblance | A story about mistaken identity involving a burglary. Author Henry Kunze, Jr. (1857-1922) was a Detroit, Michigan amateur printer; he later worked as a bookkeeper and real estate agent in Detroit. Publisher Will A. Innes (1857 or 1858-1889) worked as a clerk and later a newspaperman in Grand Rapids, Michigan. |