New Online Resource

We’re pleased to announce the availability of a new online resource: The Atlas of the Rhode Island Book Trade in the Eighteenth Century. The Atlas integrates a timeline and a map in an attempt to pinpoint as many participants in the book trade (from printers and booksellers to book binders and rag collectors) as possible in space and time. Dragging the timeline left or right (or scrolling a mouse wheel or double clicking at a point in time) adjusts the map view to show only members of the trade in operation at that point in time. The Atlas also features a searchable or browseable database and a number of viewing options, including the option to view the atlas overlaid with eighteenth-century maps of Newport and Providence.

Geographic visualization of all kinds of information abounds on the internet*, but what kind of questions does this resource answer? First, it’s a great way to get a sense of the spread and development of the book trade in the state over the course of the century. Here’s a rough dramatization of the process in twenty seconds of video:

But more particular elements in the story of the book trade become visible through a geographical lens as well. Take the case of Paul Mumford and Mary Maylem, two merchants and booksellers who, according to the Newport Mercury, were married in 1769. In itself not remarkable, but viewing a map of their locations indicates that they were neighbors, operating just across the street from each other. Romance perhaps aided by location. Or a glance at the static map view indicates how many of the book trade’s members operated in locations used previously by someone else in the trade.

Just considering previous posts from this blog, the Atlas offers a number of insights. In our most recent post, it identified the fact that Old Bet’s exhibition was actually taking place in the location used by the printer of the broadside. We can use the Atlas to chart the progress of  Thomas Truman’s exciting late-night experimentations with glowing water. We mentioned the sign of the bunch of grapes when it marked the location of Gladding’s department store, but you can also use the Atlas to find two earlier uses of the sign. And the broadside advertising the visit of a robot to Providence in 1796 gives “Mr. Todd’s bookstore” as one of the locations for ticket sales. Where was Todd’s bookstore at that time? That’s a perfect question for the Atlas.

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* For instance, find out what people think the boundaries of Providence neighborhoods are, based on their Flickr tags at http://boundaries.tomtaylor.co.uk/#2477058 .

 

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Primary source institutions like libraries, museums, and historical societies are often filled with repurposed objects, items originally intended to fulfill one task that prove perfect for something else entirely: an almanac used as a diary, a ledger book used as a canvas for a Native American artist’s depiction of a battle scene and any number of cases in which the best tool for the job was whatever happened to be at hand. It’s a recycling impulse  that’s  particularly resonant in times of economic difficulty.

Pictured here are the front and back of a blotter from the papers of Edward Carrington* (more about what a blotter is in a moment), and it offers a perfect example of just this type of practical recycling.

Front:

Back:

Paper purchased in the nineteenth century (as today) was sold in reams, and ream wrappers were to a ream of paper as dust jackets are to a book: They protected the paper itself and also offered some advertising for the papermaker.** This wrapper indicates the papermaker—A. C. & W. Curtis of Newton, Massachusetts***—, the fact that the paper is wove paper rather than laid paper, and the paper’s size, in this case pot (named for the watermark image of a pot commonly used on paper of this size).

Anyone not familiar with nineteenth-century accounting and record-keeping practices might still be wondering what a blotter actually is. Physically it was a blank book composed (in this case and others from among the dozens in the Carrington Collection) of 96 pages (made from 24 full sheets of paper). The blotter operated as a kind of working book in which various transactions might be noted during the day before eventually being stored in a more permanent form, such as a ledger.

Here’s a more contemporary explanation of blotters, or “day-books” from Salder’s Business Book-keeping & Practice (1897):

As the images of the Carrington blotter above indicate, even the wrapper was used for pen trials, quick sums, and even some stray doodling. Waste not, want not.

(For more information about ream wrappers, see the entry in the Encyclopedia of Ephemera.)

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*MSS 333, sg1, ser2, subser7, box 5, folder 3

** The American Antiquarian Society has an extensive collection of ream wrappers.

*** According to Lyman Horace Weeks (A History of Paper-Manufacturing in the United States, 1690 – 1916, New York, 1916. Pages 197-8) Simon Elliott and Solomon Curtis opened  the earliest paper mills in the Newton area. Allen C. and William Curtis took over the Curtis and Elliot mills in 1834. According to this account of an 1837 exhibition, they were the first New England papermakers to produce paper colored in the vat. A claim worth further investigation.