Link to Short Catalogue 163, on Children's Items and Material from WV, PA, OH

Martin Wetzler's 1859 Fraktur bookplate
for Elizabeth Johns.

When I started this blog, I planned to have a couple regular features: Shelfie Wednesday, where I'd share a photo or two of an item I'd recently acquired, or sometimes of a whole shelf of things. I also planned to feature what I thought of as "mini-catalogue Mondays" where I would post a little mini-list of ten or twenty items in a focused area, on as many Mondays as I could manage.

On Fridays, I'd try to write a "Post-Academic" piece of some sort.

Well, of course, I haven't managed any of those things on a truly weekly basis.  But this week, I think for the first time, I will post a mini-catalogue link on a Monday, just one week after my last Monday catalogue.

Wonderful 1880s Lithograph
Reward of Merit

This week, I have a selection of (mostly) unusual or interesting items, either children's books, or items from West Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, and including a number of great items that fit into both groups. 

While there's nothing from the middle ages here, there are nevertheless some interesting manuscript items from the nineteenth century, a couple of scarce nineteenth-century Welsh-language almanacs printed in Pittsburgh, two items signed by one of the very few Jewish Pennsylvania German fraktur scriveners known, and a spectrum of the other kinds of oddball items I can't stop myself from picking up.

Sixteen-year-old Cornelius Hayes's
frontispiece for a bound collection of
exemplary student work, ca. 1894

I hope some of my readers out there enjoy looking through these items: I've learned a lot from these books.

Here's a link to the catalogue.