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Recent Acquisition

Presidential Prints

Presidential Prints. [n.p., ca. 1841].

The Ephemera Society annual conference and fair each March offers opportunities to meet with members and to find unusual acquisitions. Fred Robichaud, who lives not far from Worcester, brought this unusual item to the fair and I snapped it up because of its unusual format. This item consists of a dozen lithographed portraits of presidents. Although Nathaniel Currier published similar single sheet charts, the item acquired in March features separate prints pasted onto canvas that are mounted on wooden supports for display in a schoolroom. This is an example of what children would have seen in an early nineteenth-century classroom, one of the topics to be discussed at the fall 2008 conference on childhood sponsored by the Program in the History of the Book in American Culture and the Center for Historic American Visual Culture.
Purchased on the Isaac Davis Fund.

-Georgia B. Barnhill, Andrew B. Mellon Curator of Graphic Arts

Recent Acquisitions Index

"One day I am visited by a collector of ordination sermons; the next, by a collector of 4th of July orations; then comes a collector of geography; another wants religious newspapers; another wants every book printed in New York before 1700. I accommodate myself to all; for I want every thing and collect every thing, and I have more zeal than the whole of them: and in this way I am kept very busy."
~Christopher Columbus Baldwin
 3rd Librarian of AAS