The Young Housekeeper’s Friend

There’s an attention to season in this cookbook that is absent even from a California farmers’ market. To…

Unpacking My Library

I am unpacking my library. Yes, I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order…

The American Spelling Book

Finding this book among the many felt like discovering a rare gem in a box of costume jewelry, although…

The Child’s Instructer

I am not the first reader to love this book for its pictures. It falls open to a pair of bucolic woodcuts of spring and…

Milton’s Works

Walker’s Dictionary

Dictionary, dik’shun-a-re. s. a book containing the words of any language, a vocabulary.

The Massachusetts Register

The Massachusetts Register is the most used book in my library. Its corners are rounded with wear and it thumbs…

Pilgrim’s Progress

Let us bother the librarian once again . Let us ask him to reach down, dust, and hand over to us that little brown book over…

National Reader

While a bible’s endpapers were often fertile ground for a family tree, school books of the eighteenth and early nineteenth…

Autographs

Since the rise of silent reading in the tenth century, books have promised private experiences. We may later convene with other readers who…