Literary Annuals
Literary annuals arrived in force upon the
American publishing
scene in the mid-1820s. These books were compilations of fiction
and poetry, often of a sentimental or religious nature, frequently
illustrated and usually handsomely bound. In writing about the
collection of literary annuals at the American Antiquarian Society,
Clarence S. Brigham focused on the very important contributions of
American authors to this genre of American imprints. Among the
writers who contributed their poems, stories, and essays were
William Cullen Bryant, Lydia Maria Child, Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Edward Everett, William Lloyd Garrison, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver
Wendell Holmes, Washington Irving, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
James Russell Lowell, Frances S. Osgood, Theodore Parker, Edgar
Allan Poe, Lydia H. Sigourney, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Nathaniel
Parker Willis.
It is surprising, given his interest in American graphic art,
that Brigham bypassed the illustrations in the literary annuals.
In general, these are steel engravings that reproduce paintings,
drawings, and watercolors by America's artists including Thomas
Doughty, Alvan Fisher, William Sidney Mount, George Loring Brown,
and William Guy Wall. A significant number of the illustrations
reproduced works by European artists of the Renaissance and later
eras and served to make the works of these artists known to a
portion of the American public.
The Society's collection numbers approximately 1,400 items,
including reissues, variant editions, but not including duplicate
copies or copies of a given edition with minor variations. There
is a short-title list of these annuals that was compiled in 1983.
All titles printed before 1841 and a scattering of later examples have
been fully cataloged. The Society's collection contains several
English and French imprints, although the vast majority were, of
course, printed in the United States.
Other means of access to the collection include Frederick
Winthrop Faxon's Literary Annuals and Gift Books (Boston, 1912)
and Ralph Thompson's American Literary Annuals and Gift Books,
1825-1865 (New York, 1936). Both are annotated to reflect the
Society's holdings. Another finding aid is Indices to American
Literary Annuals and Gift Books, 1825-1865, compiled by E. Bruce
Kirkham and John W. Fink (New Haven, 1975). The 469 titles in this
work are keyed to the microfilm edition of the annuals listed by
Thompson and reproduced in 1966 by Research Publications, Inc.
Part 1 provides basic information on each of the titles, including
editor, title, place of publication, publisher, date, table of
contents (with the names of the authors, if provided in the
volume), and a list of illustrations with the names of artists and
engravers (again, if found in the volume). Part 2 contains the
several indices for editors, publishers, cities and states of
publication, stereotypers and printers, titles of poems and
stories, authors, titles of illustrations, painters, and engravers.
No attempt was made to attribute literary or artistic works; the
indices are based on text within each volume. The indices are
research tools for both art and literary historians.
The Society does not own the microfilm edition of the literary
annuals, but it has copies of most, if not all, the titles indexed
by Kirkham and Fink.
Unlike some of the special collections at AAS that came as the
gift of just one or two donors, this collection has been acquired
during the present century from a host of booksellers. A few
titles came to AAS as gifts of donors such as Stephen Salisbury III
and Charles Henry Taylor. Many of annuals came as part
of the collection of American bindings bequeathed to AAS by Michael
Papantonio. This large and important acquisition was reported by
Marcus A. McCorison in volume 93 of the Proceedings (1983) and
in Early American Bookbindings from the
Collection of Michael Papantonio, 2nd edition (Worcester, 1986),
which contains indices of binders, previous owners, and an index of
main entries. Another important cache of annuals came as
part of the Kenneth G. Leach bindings collection.
For current information on the cataloging status of this and
other AAS collections, choose "Collection Access" below.
- Georgia B. Barnhill, Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Graphic Arts
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