Early Children's Literature Collection

Scope 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.

Inventory