40%, As Long As It Isn’t a Toy

If you’ve ever wondered what the import tariff on tallow candles, tamarind juice, or any number of other goods (including those not beginning with the letter ‘T’) in 1923 was, you’ll want to pick up a copy of Vandegrift’s United States Tariff, 1922 at the RIHS Booksale on December 3rd and 4th. It’s a great place to learn that it would have cost you an extra 30% to get a toy tambourine into the country.

How To Become an Inventor

(Hint: It seems to involve model trains.)

How to Become an Inventor offers a series of experiments like “The Magnetic Swan” (the would-be inventor can move it around on the water with a magnet-tipped wand) that introduce the reader to the most likely fields for future discoveries (such as magnetism).

Anyone looking to jump-start their career as an inventor will want to look for this on sale at the Historical Society Book Sale on December 3rd and 4th.

Guides to the Past on Sale

Time-travelling visitors to Boston or Providence shouldn’t miss the Historical Society’s upcoming booksale on December 3rd and 4th. Here are two items that will make finding your way around 1880s Providence and 1920s Boston a lot easier:

King’s Pocketbook of Providence (1882) is laid out in an alphabetized directory fashion, with entries on Providence buildings, societies and events of the time as well as longer entries offering capsule overviews of aspects of the city like is school system or the local geology.

 

Boston, A Guide Book, by Edwin M. Bacon (1928) follows the more familiar pattern of guidebooks from Baedeckers to Rick Steves. It includes some nice maps and images of Boston at the time.

Both books would be useful not only to time-travelling tourists but also anyone working on a historical novel or just doing research on the cities in question.

HVAC Work Completed

In June, the new HVAC upgrades at the John Brown House Museum were completed. With the dust settled (and nearly all cleaned up), we’ve finally had time to prepare a short slide show to provide an overview of the entire project:

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Everyone who worked on the project learned a lot, and unlike many construction projects, this one was completed on time, on budget, and with no accidents—barring a curator slamming a finger in a door and a site supervisor getting bruised feelings over what is known as the Great Banana-Doughnut Incident. (JBH Museum staff are very strict about keeping food out of the house as part of the Integrated Pest Management policy.)

We are accumulating data now on the system’s performance as heating season begins. We plan to have more information about the system, and how it works, in the spring, and can post results here then.

–Kirsten Hammerstrom, Director of Collections

Instructive Alphabet

Here’s the first post highlighting one of the items we’ll have available at the upcoming RIHS booksale:

The Instructive Alphabet, New York: Samuel S. Wood, Baltimore, 1818.

A small book for teaching children their alphabet, this little book features numerous wood engravings like the ones above. Included at the end is William Cowper’s anti-slavery poem The Negro’s Complaint.

RIHS Booksale

The Rhode Island Historical Society will hold a book sale on Friday, December 3 from 5 pm to 8 pm and Saturday, December 4, 2010 from 10 am to 5 pm at the Aldrich House, 110 Benevolent Street, in Providence.  Holiday gifts and historical treasures will be on sale to benefit the Society’s Library collections.

The Library will make available fine examples of the history of Rhode Island and other New England states in printed form, including genealogies, local histories, biographies, and an eclectic mix of rare and unusual printed materials. We’ll be highlighting a few examples here on the blog in the upcoming weeks.

The Society’s Library at 121 Hope Street, Providence, has been gathering books for almost 200 years.  Its collections of printed, manuscript, and graphics materials have been built over time through donations, bequests and purchases and that process is ongoing. Like all Library collections, these are continuously updated to maintain a vibrant, relevant, and effective collection.  Outdated books are regularly weeded to make room for new acquisitions.  As original historical materials comprise a large part of the collections, the Historical Society has a different definition of “outdated” than many institutions, but selling duplicates of books, and books whose scholarship has been superseded by newer research, helps the Society continue to buy unique Rhode Island materials and make them available to the  public. Other book sale items include donated materials that are outside the scope of the Society’s mission to collect, preserve, and share the history of the Ocean State.

It may seem ironic to sell old books to purchase “new” old books, but it is essential for any historical library to have a fund to acquire historic books, documents and objects that come on the market, such as the recently acquired photograph of late 19^th century Rhode Island African-American opera singer Sissieretta Jones, also known as the Black Patti, as well as materials that reflect new scholarship such as Tomas Avila’s Rhode Island Latino political empowerment (Milenio Publishing: 2007 ).

RIHS has the largest and most important historical collection documenting Rhode Island history, including manuscripts, printed items, photographs, maps, and film available for public viewing.

To help fund the acquisition and preservation of RIHS Collections, donate: https://secure.groundspring.org/dn/index.php?aid=21764

Leather and Textiles

Two quick notes on recent and upcoming events at the Historical Society:

First, space is still available for Saturday’s  textile preservation workshop. Dana Munroe will be offering advice about how to best care for a wide range of textiles. More information about that program and other Library events is available on our Library events page.

Second, there was a great turnout at last Saturday’s lecture, “Original Skin: A History of Books and Leather in New England” by the Historical Society’s Printed Collections Librarian, Phoebe Bean. Phoebe discussed the development of binding styles, especially as they applied to early American binders like Rhode Island’s Francis Skinner. Here are some photos from the exhibition of bindings in the Historical Society’s collections that accompanied the lecture:

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