History of the Book

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. 

Colonial Revivals: The Nineteenth-Century Lives of Early American Books
Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America
Poisonous Muse: The Female Poisoner and the Framing of Popular Authorship in Jacksonian America
Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700-1865
Revolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing the News, 1763-1789
A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the Reading Public for American Novels, 1837-1857
Education and the Culture of Print in Modern America

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The New England Primer

In 1995, The American Antiquarian Society acquired one of the two earliest known copies of the New England Primer. Considered a staple text of Puritan childhood that taught letters, reading, and religion, the first edition of the New England Primer was most likely printed between 1683 and 1690, either in London or Boston. Early printings of the text, such as the AAS copy that was printed in 1727, are extremely scarce because of heavy use by generations of children and families.

Subscription Publishing in America

Led by Michael Winship

Random Notes from a Book History Bureaucrat

Twenty-seventh Annual James Russell Wiggins Lecture in the Program in the History of the Book in American Culture. In this lecture, John B. Hench, retired vice president for collections and programs at AAS, will combine elements of memoir, reflections on the development and influence of the Society's Program in the History of the Book in American Culture (PHBAC), and notes on some of the themes in his recent scholarship on publishing in the World War II era.