Early Children's Literature Collection
Publishers in Western Massachusetts engaged in a brisk trade in books intended for children during the antebellum years, producing chapbooks to teach reading, didactic works on morals and comportment, and toy books for reward and entertainment. Brief and most often simply produced, the books are noted for their diminutive size, stock woodcut illustrations and characteristic moralistic tone, but they are rich sources for understanding popular conceptions of childhood, education, religious life, and marketing in the book trade, among other subjects.
The majority of the works in the Early Children’s Literature Collection were products of the antebellum press in western Massachusetts, produced and distributed by printers such as John Metcalf (Wendell and Northampton), Anson Phelps (Greenfield), and A. R. Merrifield (Northampton). There are examples of chapbooks from other printers, most notably Mahlon Day of New York and the American Sunday School Union in Philadelphia.
Background
The New Picture Book (1837)
Publishers in Western Massachusetts engaged in a brisk trade in books intended for children during the antebellum years, producing chapbooks to teach reading, didactic works on morals and comportment, and toy books for reward and entertainment.
Brief and often simply produced, these books are easily recognized for their diminutive size, stock woodcut illustrations, and characteristic moralistic tone, but they are rich sources for understanding popular conceptions of childhood, education, religious life, and marketing in the book trade, as well subjects. In most cases they were simply and cheaply produced, usually issued in illustrated wrappers and center sewn.
Contents of Collection
The majority of the works in the Early Children’s Literature collection were products of the antebellum press in western Massachusetts, produced and distributed by printers such as John Metcalf (Wendell and Northampton), J. H. Butler (Northampton), Anson Phelps (Greenfield), and A. R. Merrifield (Northampton). The collection includes examples of chapbooks from other printers, most notably Mahlon Day of New York and the American Sunday School Union in Philadelphia.
As simply produced as they were, the chapbooks in this collection can be quite complex bibliographically. To begin with, publishers regularly borrowed and stole from one another so that one title can appear in numerous variants: textually, the Metcalf and Phelps editions of Spring flowers are nearly identical, though laid out quite differently. Moreover, individual publishers reprinted titles as demand dictated, with variant editions not always clearly distinguished.
Most notably, the illustrations present a bibliographic challenge. Since printers purchased printing blocks in lots from wholesalers, the same illustration can appear in books by different publishers and put to different ends, while a single publisher may substitute illustrations within a single title quite eclectically, and not always aligned to the meaning of the text: the 1840 edition of John Metcalf’s Red Squirrel rather logically features an illustration of squirrel on the front wrapper, however the 1837 edition includes a temperance image of a man with a glass of water, standing by a well. The text can vary from edition to edition of what is ostensibly the same work: compare the Wendell and Northampton editions of Metcalf’s A,B,C, with pictures and verses.
Administrative information
Access
The collection is open for research.
Language:
Provenance
Acquired variously.
Related Material
Books and book history
Education
New England
Printed materials
Related Material
SCUA contains chapbooks and other materials produced by chapbook publishers in its general rare book collections and in the Rural Massachusetts Imprints Collection (RB 012).
Digitized content
A number of the chapbooks have been digitized and may be viewed online through SCUA’s digital repository, Credo.
Processing Information
Processed by I. Eliot Wentworth, Nov. 2017.
Copyright and Use (More information
)
Cite as: Early Children’s Literature Collection (RB 017). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries.