Library Company of Philadelphia
We love the delicate gold decoration on our copy of The Ladies’ Hand-Book of Knitting, Netting, and Crochet (New York, 1844).
#PublishersBindingThursday
The Ladies’ hand-book of knitting, netting and crochet.
New York : J. S. Redfield.
1844
“The house in which a great poet has lived always interests us, but it can not hold so much of his life as the trees through which his thoughts have made Æolian melodies, or the roadsides along which his imaginations have blossomed into song.” –Lucy Larcom.
We’re celebrating #PublishersBindingThursday and #NationalPoetryMonth with our copy of Lucy Larcom’s Landscape in American Poetry (New York, circa 1879), which features overlapping landscape designs printed in black and gold, as well as bevelled edge boards.
Larcom, Lucy.
Landscape in american poetry. New York : D. Appleton and Company.
[c1879]
Side Hustles for 19th-century Ladies
This how-to book, Ladies’ Manual of Art, or Profit and Pastime (Philadelphia, 1887), includes chapters on tinting photographs, painting china, making wax molds, and taxidermy in addition to more familiar topics such as embroidery and landscape painting. The front cover presents a clever composition of painting supplies and a stool in a natural setting, with a small landscape painting superimposed on a similar image enlarged. The presumably female reader would have laughed at the book’s frontispiece depicting a man perched atop a fence to escape the bulls who have invaded the bucolic scene he is attempting to paint!
- Connie King, Chief of Reference and Curator of Women’s History
Our copy of Lydia Howard Sigourney’s The Weeping Willow (Hartford, 1847) is bound in a striped cloth that nearly obscures the blind-blocked decorative border on the cover. #PublishersBindingThursday
Our copy of Clarence Cook’s The House Beautiful (New York, 1878) includes this gold-stamped illustration of a young woman reading on a chaise longue by a fireplace… #goals
#MacroMonday
Our copy of Allitter, or The Melody of Language (New York, 1836) features a gorgeous example of ribbon embossed cloth. #PublishersBindingThursday
Strait, H.
Allitter, or the melody of language. New York: G. A. C. Van Beuren.
1836.
Our copy of The Lover’s Companion: A Handbook of Courtship and Marriage (Philadelphia, 1850) features a helpful ring-bearing cherub
#AFineLibraryRomance
We were challenged by the American Antiquarian Society to post seven days of #bookcovers without explanation or review.
Day 7:
We had so much fun participating in this challenge! Thanks for joining us!
We were challenged by the American Antiquarian Society to post seven days of #bookcovers without explanation or review.
Day 6:
Herbert, Henry W.
The sportsman’s vade mecum. New York : Stringer & Townsend.
1850.
We were challenged by the American Antiquarian Society to post seven days of #bookcovers without explanation or review.
Day 5:
Pinkerton, Allan.
The Expressman and the Detective. Chicago : W. B. Keen, Cooke & Co.
1875.