First Editions
Although the Society has concentrated its energies on
collecting examples of popular fiction, rather than the canon of
"Standard American Authors," the scholar concerned with American
literature would be grossly misled if no reference were made to the
Society's very substantial collections of first editions of the
principal American writers. One of Clarence S. Brigham's proudest
achievements was the development of outstanding holdings in this
expression of American culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. The First Editions collection is another example of
Brigham's interest in literature. Working in concert with P. K.
Foley, the Boston bookseller who compiled his generation's
"definitive" checklist of American literary work entitled American
Authors, 1795-1895; A Bibliography of First and Notable Editions
(Boston, 1897), Brigham built a superlative collection around the
nearly 6,000 titles that were composed by Foley's 286 authors. The
Society maintains an annotated and greatly expanded version of
"Foley." Items in the First Editions collection are described in
the Imprints Catalog at AAS and appear in the twenty-volume
Dictionary Catalog of AAS holdings published in 1971 by
Greenwood.
Pre-1841 materials have been transferred from the First Editions
collection to other collections but are accessible online. A card file of
titles transferred from the First Editions collection is available on
request.
Bibliography of American Literature, begun in 1955 by Jacob
Blanck and completed in 1991 by Michael Winship, comes out of the
same tradition as that of Foley (and Joseph Sabin before him).
Blanck built on Foley's work as well as that of his own master,
Merle Johnson, and used AAS as one of his principal sources to
authors from the Federal period to the latter part of the
nineteenth century. But AAS does not attempt to rival the complete
collections of the standard American authors (except for James Fenimore
Cooper) that are held by the Houghton Library at Harvard, the
Library of Congress, Waller Barrett's great collections at the
University of Virginia, the Beinecke Library at Yale, the Lilly
Library at Indiana University, and at the Huntington Library.
Nevertheless, the scholar studying American literature will do well
to examine the holdings of AAS, for AAS has on its shelves
impressions, editions, or even unsuspected titles of our national
authors that may solve a conundrum for the inquirer.
- by Marcus A. McCorison, President Emeritus; updated by Alan
N. Degutis, Head of Cataloging
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For current information on the cataloging status of this and
other AAS collections, choose "Collection Access" below.
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