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Digest March-April 2023
Manuscript Digest: March – April 2023 – 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 news in this digest […]
Recent Posts
Resources Available: Auctions, Values, Catalogs
Manuscript Society members are always looking for an item to complete a collection. A letter, an image, a photograph, it does not matter. What will be a fair price for the sought after piece? What about the provenance? Where can I find many different catalogs? It has always been a [...]
One Really Bad Egg and a Visit to Calling Cards
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 [...]
Handwriting – Something to Celebrate
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 [...]
1795 Epidemic – A Doctor’s Diary
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 [...]
17th Century Letterlocking Letters Unlocked
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 [...]
Interview: J.R.R. Tolkien Collection – Interview with Curator
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 [...]
Eckert Personal Papers Now at Huntington
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. [...]





