Published in association with the Bibliographical Society of America and the National First Ladies' Library

Although many early U.S. presidents were avid readers and book collectors--George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, to name a few--they usually brought their own books to the White House and removed them at the end of their terms. It was not until 1850 that Millard and Abigail Fillmore established the first official White House collection. This catalogue of the library that they assembled not only reveals much about their own preoccupations and interests and those...

Making the Archives Talk is a collection of twelve essays by editor, biographer, bibliographer, and book historian James L. W. West III. In these essays, West sets forth his views of editorial theory, archival use, textual emendation, and scholarly annotation. He has published editions of major writings by Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Styron. Drawing on these editions for examples, West defends intentionalist editing and the eclectic emendation of texts. He discusses the treatment of both public documents (novels, stories, and nonfiction) and private texts...

Anyone who pays attention to the popular press knows that the new media will soon make books obsolete. But predicting the imminent demise of the book is nothing new. At the beginning of the twentieth century, for example, some critics predicted that the electro-mechanical phonograph would soon make books obsolete. Still, despite the challenges of a century and a half of new media, books remain popular, with Americans purchasing more than eight million books each day. In How Books Came to America, John Hruschka traces the development of the American book trade from the moment of...