Replica of “first thing ever printed in Worcester.”
Recently author Caroline Linden & I paid a visit to the American Antiquarian Society. I’m one lucky Nerdy History Girl: It’s only a short drive from my house.
The place is like the Tardis: bigger on the inside, although it’s pretty big on the outside, too—which it needs to be, since it’s the home of “the world’s largest and most accessible collection of books, pamphlets, broadsides, newspapers, periodicals, children's literature, music, and graphic arts material printed before the twentieth century in what is now the United States.” Four million items or so. One cannot see everything in a 45 minute tour, nor can one take photos of everything without holding up progress, but here’s a sampling of what we saw.
The first image, from the website, is Antiquarian Hall in 1812. The rest are our photographs (mainly my husband’s). The printing press is the original press on which Isaiah Thomas produced The Massachusetts Spy. He started out in Boston, but made a hasty exit, press and all, when things in Boston got too hot for this revolutionary. You can read the story here.
The large space is the Reading Room, and the light is in the dome.
The print, “The Circulating Library,” is one you may have seen before in one of my posts, either here or on social media. It was one of several enlarged images from the collection that hang in the Introductory Gallery (the images change periodically).
We saw a number of letters, but there wasn’t time to photograph all of them and their transcriptions. I chose these two because the subject matter was interesting: In one case, the writer has accidentally started a fire; the other reports the defeat of Lee’s army.
“The Radcliffe Suffragette” is a supposedly hilarious satire of the women’s suffrage movement.
And, finally, the two authors at the front of the AAS.
The AAS offers free tours on Wednesdays at 3PM. Along with seeing the sorts of things we were able to photograph, you get to go behind the scenes, into the stacks, conservation area, and other parts of the AAS’s inner workings. Well worth a visit if you’re in the area. If you’re not, the website is a treat, with vast quantities of material online.