Civil War letter archive comprising 78 chronologically arranged letters, the majority from Corporal Christopher C. Mead of the 12th New Jersey Regiment to his wife, Hannah, dated November 12, 1862, to May 29, 1864.
Archive of 1880s business correspondence between William Treloar, gold-mining engineer and manager of the Gold Hill Mines, Rowan County, North Carolina, and the Gold Hill Mine Company in London. Primarily letters from the London headquarters to Treloar in Salisbury, with several reƒtained copies of his outgoing correspondence. Also includes an 1865 Civil War-era letter concerning the Stewart Gold Mine, an 1894 brochure on the Appalachian Gold Belt, and an 1895 gold-mining catalog from Mecklenburg County, North Carolina.
A characteristic piece of African-American popular culture, a dream book intended for players of the policy or numbers game popular in cities across the US from Chicago to New York. Three digit numbers were keyed to dreams and intended to be played for the daily game. Some contained additional tables of luck numbers for specific jackets (Eddie Arcano, 137), for Harlem occurrences (“To hear a man play the dozen, 912”) and past performance tables for numbers dating from 1931 to 1940.
Ephemeral and cheaply printed, the books were sold a newsstand, candy stores, occult trinket shops and most anywhere else people would gather to buy daily sundries such as cigarettes etc.
While this collection is far from complete, we do feel it’s a good foundation for a broader study of twentieth century African-American urban life through the use of different marketing techniques.
We also feel that there is possible future deep research potential in urban job printing and commerce in general.
I
A note on duplicate titles:
While the “guts” of each book are usually pretty similar, we think the small variances in ads, size of publication, and graphics mark important differences in each example, once again opening up new avenues of research.
A collection of 94 albums, mostly kept by young women, containing
inscriptions and autographs as well as, in many cases, laid-in ephemera
ranging from pressed botanicals to newspaper clippings to miniature
photographs to (in one case) a lock of hair.
The memory book evolved from the earlier commonplace book, an album
filled with pasted-in printed material as well as elegant manuscript copies of
published works. Memory books are distinguished from their precursor (and
indeed from their cousin, the autograph book) by their original material,
which, taken together with the name of the inscriber and the date and often
location of the inscription, provides a glimpse into the quotidian world of
young people, their social circles, relationships, families, and communities.
And, while the content of some of these books is limited to the social (and
temporal) environs of a school or a church, in many cases they continued in
use over the course of a decade or more — even, in a few cases, throughout
the owner’s adult life. The sheer number of place-names sometimes found in
a single album pays witness to the movement and vitality of a young
America as it stretched and grew.
Several 19 th
century publishers/stationers (notably J.C. Riker, Leavitt &
Allen, and D. Appleton & Co.) supplemented their trade in printed books
by producing blank albums designed for use as memory books. These
albums were usually bound in gift book bindings, with elaborate leather
tooling and blindstamping, gilt titles and decoration, color block stamping,
and (naturally) all edges gilt. They were illustrated with fine steel
engravings and sometimes full-color lithographs, and often contained pages
of varying colors, weights, and finishes, which were sometimes pre-printed
with geometric shapes meant to mimic blank calling cards arranged in
fanciful patterns. The covers sometimes boasted romantic titles, such as
“Album of Love,” “Forget-Me Not Album,” “Leaves of Friendship,” and
“Album of Gems.”