Library Company of Philadelphia
We have a charming little number from popular Philadelphia publisher Henry Altemus for your #publishersbindingThursday enjoyment.
Initially a bookbindery known for their beautiful photographic albums and bibles, Altemus began issuing series and reprints around 1889, all with elaborate and striking decorated cloth bindings such as this.
Gold dust: A collection of golden counsels for the sanctification of daily life. Translated from the French by E.L.E.B. ; edited by Charlotte M. Yonge. Philadelphia: Henry Altemus, [1897?]
There’s still time to see our current exhibition, From Negro Pasts to Afro-Futures: Black Creative Re-Imaginings, free and open to the public in our main gallery through Friday, October 18.
Included in the exhibition is this photograph from our Stevens-Cogdell / Sanders Venning Collection showing members of the Treble Clef Mandolin and Guitar Club, circa 1905.
There’s still time to register for our upcoming seminar, Mirror of a City: Images of Philadelphia, 1780-1950, taking place September 26, October 10, and October 24.
Join Library Company curators Sarah Weatherwax and Erika Piola for this three-part seminar, in which attendees will examine the pivotal role of Philadelphia in creating the visual culture of the nation as a center for printmaking, photography, and collecting. Sessions will explore the social, cultural, and technological influences affecting Philadelphia image making; the known, hidden, and forgotten image makers; and the changing aesthetics of the physical city, as well as tastes of those who notably collected all manner of Philadelphia imagery. Seminar attendees will also gain knowledge about the evolution of the Library’s graphic collections, as well as have hands-on experiences with specimens of early photography, including daguerreotypes and stereographs.
The Library Company is pleased to announce that we have some scholarship funds available to help defray costs of students, teachers, artists, and employees at peer institutions. Check out the event site for more information.
For nearly two hundred years, researchers of Philadelphia history from all disciplines and backgrounds have turned to John Fanning Watson’s extensive Annals of Philadelphia to help uncover the stories of the city’s past. First published in 1830 and subtitled “A Collection of Memoirs, Anecdotes, & Incidents of the City and Its Inhabitants from the Days of the Pilgrim Founders,” Watson’s Annals has become an enduring and impactful source of knowledge on a range of Philadelphia’s legacies that includes information on everything from agriculture and apparel to transportation and military history.
Library Company Print and Photograph Department intern and Haverford College student, Allison Wise, has spent the last few months working with our extra-illustrated copy of Watson’s Annals. Read all about it on the Library Company blog.
Watson, John Fanning. Annals of Philadelphia. Philadelphia: E. L. Carey & A. Hart, 1830.
William Birch, An Unfinished House, in Chesnut Street, Philadelphia (Philadelphia: William Birch, 1800).
In 1785, The Library Company acquired, at auction, much of the contents of the American Museum of Pierre Eugène du Simitière (1737-1784), the Geneva-born artist, naturalist, and antiquary. Du Simitière was a restless man, forever traveling, forever collecting, forever projecting grand schemes in solitude. At the American Musuem (the first public museum, btw), du Simitière presented his many materials collected during his travels and from his collections.
Toward the late 1760s, du Simitière’s collecting became more and more focused on the political history of North America. The Stamp Act of 1765 generated almost instantaneous opposition in the American colonies, and du Simitière was quick to gather the resulting effusions. He acquired this one-penny sheet of stamped paper from a Philadelphia coffee house, where it was posted after arriving from New York, a vestige of 10 boxes of such paper that had been burned.
The paper includes a note: “Part of the combustible matter which was preserv’d from amidst the devouring flames, which lately consum’d 10 boxes of the same commodity; at New York.”
Each Wednesday this month we will be highlighting the collectors and collections that have shaped the Library Company of Philadelphia since 1731, as part of the #MagnificentCollections challenge sponsored by Smithsonian Libraries.
In January 2019, Zachary M. Schrag, a professor in George Mason University’s Department of History and Art History, examined a range of 19th-century nativist material in the Library Company’s collections. One item in particular—an issue of a short-lived and little-known Philadelphia newspaper— proved especially relevant to his research.
Read Professor Schrag’s views on why the Native Flag, especially its front-page engraving, offers new insight into how Philadelphia nativists understood themselves and their opponents in 1844, the year of the city’s nativist riots, on the Library Company blog.
We love the moody winter moonlight in this circa 1840s hand-colored lithograph, which shows the State House (now Independence Hall) at Sixth and Chestnut streets in Philadelphia. #LibraryWonderland
Wild, J. C. (John Caspar). State House. Philadelphia. Philadelphia: J.T. Bowen. c1840, 1848
Get out your hats, scarves, mittens, and ice skates– it’s time for the #LibraryWonderland challenge! Keep a look out for winter-related items from our collection every Wednesday this month.
We’re kicking things off with this circa 1931 photograph from our John Frank Keith Photograph Collection of a child bundled up in winter clothing. Keith was an amateur photographer specializing in portraits of residents of South Philadelphia and Kensington neighborhoods beginning in the early 1910s to 1940s.
You can see more images from our John Frank Keith Photograph Collection here.
As part of the #NotHiddenLabor challenge, this week we share this 1890 photograph showing laborers, including three African American men and one white youth without shoes, from the Philadelphia Grain Elevator Co. posing in front of a grain storage building.
We are excited to join the Special Collections of the University of Texas at San Antonio, the Labor Archives of Washington, and Northwestern University’s Transportation Library in the September #NotHiddenLabor challenge! Each week this month we will be sharing items from our collection that document various aspects of the American labor movement, trade unions, and American workers in general.
This Charles Pancoast photograph from our World War One Photograph and Ephemera Collection shows members of the National League of Workers taking a break from gardening at Little Wakefield in Germantown. Founded during World War One in 1917, the National League of Workers was formed by a group of women as a national organization geared toward the standardization of work of the women of the United States. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., it quickly became a nationwide force with a particularly large division in Pennsylvania.