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Our Holiday Bookshelf
Our Holiday Bookshelf
Our Holiday Bookshelf
Season's Greetings!
Originally done manually by skilled craftsmen, the bookbinding process had become mechanized in the nineteenth century. This technology introduced brand new methods for decorating books and publishers were quick to make the most of them. With richly colored cloth and pictorial designs block-stamped in gold and inks, these books made attractive gifts. Kent State University Libraries’ Special Collections & Archives holds strong collections of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British, American and children’s literature, from which our holiday bookshelf was selected.
Books in the above photo, from left to right.
Chimes for Childhood: A Collection of Songs for Little Ones (Boston: Lee and Shepard, Publishers, 1871)
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Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol in Prose: Being a Ghost Story of Christmas (London: Chapman & Hall, 1843) [rebound in red leather]
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Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol in Prose: Being a Ghost Story of Christmas (London: Chapman & Hall, 1873) [original publisher’s cloth binding]
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T. S. Arthur, editor, Friends and Neighbors, or, Two Ways of Living in the World (Philadelphia: H. C. Peck & Theo Bliss, 1857)
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James Lane Allen, The Choir Invisible (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1897)
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John Fox, Jr., Christmas Eve on Lonesome and Other Stories (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1904)
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Mary J. Holmes, Christmas Stories (New York: G. W. Carleton & Co., Publishers, 1885)
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John Greenleaf Whittier, Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1866) [publisher’s binding in green cloth]
John Greenleaf Whittier, Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1866) [publisher’s binding in reddish brown cloth]
Edna St. Vincent Millay, The Buck in the Snow and Other Poems (New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1928)
Washington Irving, Old Christmas (London: Macmillan & Co., 1878)
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F. Marion Crawford, The Little City of Hope: A Christmas Story (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1907)
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Mary Mapes Dodge, Hans Brinker, or, The Silver Skates: A Story of Life in Holland (New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co., 1877)
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