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American Antiquarian Society

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American Antiquarian Society

The American Antiquarian Society (AAS) has been committed to sharing America's stories for more than 200 years.

We collect, preserve, and make available for study the pre-twentieth-century printed record of what is now the U.S.

08/25/2026

Oof! It is back to school week for so many!

Images of female dunces are fairly rare in children’s books, but here is an example of a school girl standing on the dunce stool. Not only does she have to stand on a special stool, but she also has to wear a mask bearing the sign “dunce,” no doubt serving as a dramatic reminder to schoolmates.
The image, taken from Fisher & Brother’s Merry Making Riddles, was published in both Philadelphia and Baltimore around 1855; it also includes a riddle:

My 1st is in sea, but not in land.
My 2d is in ocean, but not in sand.
My 3d is in hill, but not in vale.
My 4th is in mountain, but not in dale,
My 5th is in oak, but not in tree,
My 6th is in lake, but not in sea.
My whole is a place of improvement.
�
Answer: SCHOOL.

08/20/2026

🧰 Do you have your lunch box ready for back to school?

The creator of this box, Robert Gair (1839-1927) revolutionized paper box and bag manufacturing in the 19th-century.

Born in Scotland, Gair moved to the United States at the age of 14; he fought in the American Civil War and later started his business on Chambers Street in Manhattan where he printed retail goods. In 1870, while running paper bags through a printing press to print a label, he noticed that every bag was slit across its face. He examined the press and found that the type rule had been set too high as it was cutting and printing the bags. Gair saw that he could cut and print a bag with one operation, so he invented machinery where paper and pasteboard could be creased, cut, and printed at once. Shortly after, he made his first folding box. Gair is credited with having changed the appearance of stores in many lines of retail trades.

This foldable lunch box features an image of the (100-room!) Brock House Hotel in Enterprise, Florida (built in 1854 and torn down in 1937). This lunch box also has a striped string for holding your lunch!

08/17/2026

It is national thrift shop day!

While some of our acquisitions are found in thrift and second hand stores, today’s post is about the secondhand trade in the 1850s in Connecticut. This advertising card is for furniture, but the owner, James Minor (-) was also in search of beds, bedding, Crocker, brass, copper, zinc, old pewter, lead, Britannia (metal), glass and bottles. Exchange could be either for furniture or cash. Minor's second hand furniture shop was on Crown Street in New Haven.

08/13/2026

🫲 It’s international Left-handers day!��

For those of us who are left handed, living in a right hand world can be challenging. But imagine being left handed in the early 19th-century, when using your left hand was a problem that needed to be corrected!

Mary Palmer Tyler (1775-1866) included a section on handedness in her guide to child rearing, offering advice to parents on teaching children to use their right hand.

The section includes this poem:

Now, when his little hands from bo***ge free,
restless expand in new-born liberty
You teach the Child, with reprehension light,
In preference to the left to use the right.

Today we can read this advice and wonder why a child’s preferred hand was such a concern, but many parents were worried when they found out their child was left-handed. All that said, Tyler was more reassuring than her advice would suggest. While she described it as a “defect,” she also writes that “all anxiety on the subject is superfluous.”

Tyler’s Maternal Physician was first published in 1811 in Vermont and was the first comprehensive guide to raising children written by an American woman. This second edition, published in 1818, reprints the same advice.

08/11/2026

With so many others, we mourn the loss of Jackie the Bald Eagle 🦅

Jackie joins a history of celebrated American eagles, including “Old Abe,” the famous mascot of the 8th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry Regiment during the American Civil War. In our collections we hold an albumen photograph of Old Abe resting on a perch, mounted on card, and produced around the centennial. The carte-de-visite, measuring just 11x7 cm, was a souvenir of the celebrity-bird.

Old Abe’s iconic status began with his service as mascot, but after the war his presence was requested from across the country. He appeared at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, as well as local and national conventions up until his death in 1881 after which his image was reproduced and circulated.

This photograph is part of the Stephen Davies Paine collection, donated to the Society in 2024.

08/10/2026

Oof. There’s a lot of Mondays in August.

This stern image of a mastiff was engraved by Daniel Scrope Throop (b. 1800), an upstate New York artist whose output includes the early children's frontier tale Adventures of Peter Jones (ca. 1830). Even though the mastiff is considered a domestic animal, this fierce looking dog holds its own against the armadillo, sloth and raccoon, also represented in this History of Animals No. 1 printed in Oxford New York by Mack & Chapman in 1829.

This week we are welcoming participants to the Historic Children’s Voices K-12 Teacher Institute for educators in social studies and language arts. The five-day institute includes hands-on workshops using our collection of early American books for children, as well as its collections of children’s own writings from the colonial period through the 19th century.

08/08/2026

💰On this day, August 8, 1786, Congress chose the dollar as the US monetary unit. Today’s post focuses on pieces of a dollar, in the form of coin rubbings!

Although the original money is likely long-since-spent, we can still see examples of the 1821 Capped Bust half dollar, as well as an 1853 Large Cent (also known as a Braided Hair Design). Do you recognize any other 19th-century coins? The rubbings were made on the endpapers of a children’s book by an unknown reader. The text is Christoph vol Schmid 's(1768-1854) The Stolen Child, Or How Henry von Eichenfels came to the knowledge of God. It was translated from German and published by John Winebrenner in Harrisburg in 1836.

08/05/2026

☀️ Summer magazines and periodicals, anyone? Would you like to see one which is exactly 100 years old this month? 🎂

Speaking of sweet stuff, this issue of the American printer, produced in August 1926, contains some beautiful color advertisements and candy-for-the-eyes, including this one for printing inks by Charles Eneu Johnson and Company of Philadelphia, a manufacturer of inks established in 1804 by Charles’ grandfather Charles Johnson Sr. The print was designed by E. McKnight Kauffer (1890-1954) known as the “poster king” who revolutionized graphic design in the early 20th century.

Also included in the August 1926 issue is an advertisement for paper producer, The West Virginia Pulp & Paper Company for “Westvaco eggshell” paper; the company was incorporated in 1898 by William Luke and sons. This eggshell paper was the signature sheet of the company, know for its non glossy, soft finish.

Even the cover is simple and gorgeous! The American Printer was founded as a trade journal in Chicago as the Inland Printer in 1883, and it produced its final issue in August 2011.

08/03/2026

📊 Any infographic fans out there?

In August 1776, members of the Continental Congress affixed their signatures to the engrossed copy of the Declaration of Independence. Then began the curious work of seeing how they fit together. 🤔

This wall chart traces personal and historic connections between the signers of the Declaration, including commonalities in education, occupation, and age. Through a complex series of lines and dots, the center portion of the chart tries to illustrate these statistics in an easy-to-understand way. The chart also includes a transcription of the Declaration at the top and list of states that have joined the union since the signing of the Declaration and the Constitution. The content of the chart was prepared and copyrighted by John Carroll Powers of Peoria, Illinois, who, in the 1870s wrote one of the early biographies of Abraham Lincoln. It was lithographed in Philadelphia by P.S. Duval & Son in 1858.

Want to study the chart further? Check out the link in our bio to enlargements of the diagram!

07/31/2026

Kinda chic to 💅

Don’t mind if we jump on this trend

Kinda chic to send your friend a letter instead of a text
Kinda chic to learn how real people lived instead of just historical celebrities
Kinda chic to love old book smell
Kinda chic to fix broken things instead of buying new
Kinda chic to be quiet when the world is loud
Kinda chic to love real, beautiful, old things

What would you add?

Address

185 Salisbury Street
Worcester, MA
01609

Opening Hours

Monday	9am - 5pm
Tuesday	10am - 5pm
Wednesday	9am - 5pm
Thursday	9am - 5pm
Friday	9am - 5pm

Website

http://americanantiquarian.org/

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