The tangram is a geometric puzzle composed of seven flat pieces which can be combined to create over 6,500 different shapes. Originating in China, the brainteaser became popular in the West  around 1815, and reached Philadelphia in 1816. 

The answer key was published separately.  We acquired the answer key years before we acquired a copy of the puzzles, which we think kinda ruins the fun. 

C. C. Chapman. Scientific amusements for the old and the young, the grave and the gay. Philadelphia: Stereotyped by S. Douglas Wyeth, 1844.

This watercolor is from a friendship album owned by Amy Mathilda Cassey who was a middle-class African American woman active in the anti-slavery movement and African American cultural community.

In addition to containing watercolors likely created by Cassey herself, the album features entries by other prominent abolitionists such as Sarah Mapps Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Frederick Douglass.

View more of the album here

Friends, we are pleased to announce that we have made it to #FinisFriday.  

This finispiece comes from Tomasso Azzio’s book on chess which examines the game and its rules as a metaphor for society, morality, and law. 

Thomas Actius.  Thomas Actii Forosemproniensis De ludo scacchorum in legali methodo tractatus. Pisauri: Concordiam, 1583. 

In Deephaven, the charming Kate Lancaster invites the story’s narrator Helen Denis to spend the summer with her in the house of her recently deceased great-aunt – in the quiet town of Deephaven, Maine. The two twenty-four-year-old women from Boston spend an idyllic summer like “two children." 

At the end of the season, Kate laughingly proposes that they copy the Ladies of Llangollen and create their own life together in Deephaven instead of returning to Boston. But it’s only talk. Kate and Helen do not become a couple like the two Irish women who famously lived together for over fifty years starting in 1778 in the Welsh town of Llangollen. 

However, the book’s author Sarah Orne Jewett did form a close relationship with the author Annie Fields, whom she met in 1877. The two had a "Boston marriage” – the then-current term for two women who lived together.

Sarah O. Jewett. Deephaven. Sixth edition. Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1878.

From our 2014 exhibition That’s So Gay: Outing Early America. To see more of the exhibition, visit www.librarycompany.org/gayatlcp

It’s the first day of June so you know what that means! 

Photo Illustrators Firm, [Children posed on lawn chairs], ca. 1950. Gelatin silver print.

Image depicts a row of eight children waving as they lie on cushioned lawn chairs in a park.

Hardly had the threat of yellow fever begun to recede in the northern part of the U.S. when a new plague emerged that was in some ways even worse: Cholera. Cholera had long been endemic in parts of India, but an outbreak in 1817 spread to China and Indonesia, making it the first cholera pandemic. Millions died. The second pandemic in 1829 spread north to Russia, across Europe, and hit the U.S. in 1832. In New York 3,500 people died that year, but in Philadelphia the death rate was significantly smaller. This was attributed to Philadelphia’s superior water works, which provided plenty of fresh, clean water to cleanse the streets of filth.

 More about cholera, Dr. John Snow, the Broad Street Pump, and modern epidemiology in the latest Pandemic Reading, now on the blog. 

 Image: “Death’s Dispensary,” Fun Magazine III. London : [s.n.] August 18,1866.

We were delighted to learn that it’s not just us, but that squirrels have been mocking gardeners for centuries.   In early America, almanacs such as this one were issued yearly in each major city, and were second only to the Bible in the number of copies printed and sold. But as they were only good for the year issued, they were usually discarded despite their sometimes delightful and elaborate covers. 

John Tobler. The Pennsilvania [sic] town and country-man’s almanack, for the year of our lord 1762. Germantown: Christopher Sower, 1761.

Special delivery! It’s a new blog post by Senior Curator of Graphic Arts Sarah Weatherwax! Learn more about some of the items in the Graphic Arts collection which illustrate the history of horse-drawn delivery services in the nineteenth century: https://librarycompany.org/2020/05/21/special-delivery/

Philadelphia on a Busy Day. Photomechanical postcard, ca. 1915.

Happy Memorial Day! If you’re out and about, we hope you’re being safe and maintaining proper distance like these two!

[D.S. Ewing trade cards] (Philadelphia, ca. 1885). Chromolithograph.

Image depicts a beach scene showing siblings (brother and sister) on the beach, a boat with a sail labeled “new home”, and a sewing machine in the sky. The boy has a patch with the initials “N.H.” sewn onto the back of his pants and a caption under their feet reads: Sister.–What are the wild waves saying? Brother.–This patch was put on by the light running new home sewing machine.

Quarantine is not new. In the U.S., quarantine began in response to yellow fever. In 1742, after an outbreak the year before, a quarantine station was opened on Province Island where the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers meet. The 1753 Scull and Heap map shows a “pest house” there, called the Lazaretto. In 1799, after three successive annual outbreaks of fever (that’s not counting the 1793 calamity), the city created a board of health, which built a much larger Lazaretto a few miles farther downstream at Essington, a few hundred yards from what is now the west end of the airport runway. That building still stands.  Librarian Jim Green talks more about the Lazaretto, quarantine, and isolation in his latest Pandemic Reading, now on the blog. 

Image 1: Nicholas Scull and George Heap. A map of Philadelphia and parts adjacent. [S.l.: s.n, 1753] . 

Image 2: By Smallbones, Public Domain

#BensLibrary #PandemicReading #LCPonline #quarantine #yellowfever #Lazaretto #History