Book Reviews: It is all about education. Whether you collect books or autographs or both, the educated collector is the savvy collector. Just ask Bill Butts. Every year a stream of reference works, how-tos, exhibition catalogs, bibliographies, and memoirs useful to collectors come on the market. Few receive scant attention [...]
January 23rd - National Handwriting Day Page of Manuscript - In Search of Lost Time - Marcel Proust - 1913 To hand write a letter or send an email. Maybe a text. Perhaps a tweet. How do you stay in contact with your friends and family? The [...]
Anderson’s record of the 238 yellow fever patients admitted to Bellevue between August and October 1795; 137 of them died. (Alexander Anderson Papers / New-York Historical Society Library) Anderson's Diary Highlights Epidemic "Word of the disease in New York City came “from every quarter.” The place was [...]
Letterlocking Letterlocking used complicated folds to seal correspondence. (Unlocking History Research Group Archive) What do Mary Queen of Scots, Galileo, Marie Antoinette and Niccolò Machiavelli have in common? All practiced letterlocking! Letterlocking used complicated folds to seal correspondence. Virtually hiding correspondence from prying eyes. Sometimes the recipient might [...]
Manuscript Digest – February/March 2021 – This complimentary e-digest, now published bi-monthly, covers significant acquisitions and sales, manuscripts lost and found, rare books and ephemera, document conservation, and more. […]
Collecting Conversations: An Interview with William Fliss, Archivist of Special Collections and University Archives at Marquette University. Curator, J. R. R. Tolkien collection Kevin Segall William Fliss, Archivist of Special Collections and University Archives at Marquette University. Curator, J. R. R. Tolkien collection J.R.R. Tolkien Collection - Marquette [...]
The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens has acquired the personal papers of Thomas T. Eckert (1825–1910). Left: “…get hold of Edison & keep him,” urged a promoter of Thomas Edison’s quadruplex telegraph to Thomas Eckert, president of the Atlantic and Pacific Telegraph Co., in 1876. Thomas T. [...]
William Henry Dorsey William Henry Dorsey was an African American of means who lived in 19th-century Philadelphia. Like many others of his generations, he was bitten by the collecting and archiving bug. The son of Thomas Dorsey, an enslaved man who fled bondage in Maryland and secured his freedom in [...]
For everyone who has every collected books, stamps, coins and certainly manuscripts you remember the moment. You make one purchase and find an additional surprise. So it was for in William Leslie in 2014. With time on his hands, a visit to an old bookstore. Then a thin paper [...]
Lincoln's Inaugural Photograph - May 4, 1861 Iconic photo of Lincoln’s first inauguration. Now believed to be taken by government photographer John Wood. LOC “The avenue in front of the portico was thronged with people, the crowd extending to a great distance on either side and reaching far [...]