McLoughlin Bros. Collection - 1997 Addition

The published text for Cinderella by the McLoughlin Bros., New-York, 1889. CLICK ANY IMAGE TO ENLARGE

The 1997 Addition to the McLoughlin Bros. Collection supplements the collection given by Herbert H. Hosmer to the AAS in 1978. For an alphabetical index of the Hosmer McLoughlin Archival Drawings and Prints, click here. The 1997 Addition consists of 745 items in forty-seven boxes including watercolors, pen and ink, paste-ups and proofs. The material ranges in focus from object-lessons and alphabets, to fairy tales, religious and hunting scenes. The detailed Box List, Indices and PDF located in this website offer access to the 1997 Addition.

Six original watercolors for the chromolithographs published in the 1889 Cinderella by the McLoughlin Bros. CLICK ANY IMAGE TO ENLARGE

The Box List page provides a description of the material, medium and link to a complete box/folder inventory with sample illustrations, known books and illustrators, subject headings and descriptions of the contents. For the Box List, click here. Or to keyword search the Box List PDF, click here. Illustrations for twenty-seven books in the children’s literature holdings of the American Antiquarian Society have been identified. For the title/call number index, click here. Additional indices, available here, have been collected for artist, subject/genre and story. Like the McLoughlin Bros. - Hosmer Archival Drawings and Prints, this addition documents the production and illustration of children’s books as the nineteenth turned into the twentieth century. Preliminary watercolors for chromolithographs, extensive cover designs, decorative images for borders and in-set illustration are all included in the collection. More practical paste-ups, inked cyanotypes and enlargements were used by the firm in the course of a book's development - and they form an important part of the 1997 Addition. While arguably illustrations are only part of book design, for the McLoughlin firm, they were an integral one. Texts such as the fairy tale Cinderella, depicted to the left, are enriched by the artistry of an illustrator while simultaneously showcasing the publisher’s printing technology. This inventory was organized and researched between 2004-9 by Ellen Rubin O'Hearn and Jaclyn Penny as part of the collection access initiative of the Center for Historic American Visual Culture.