Department
Collections
Sixty years of buttons, a one-room museum of carpenter's tools, a single-collector cookbook archive.
A Collection of American Trade Cards, 1880 to 1905
In a third-floor apartment in Chicago, the retired graphic designer Henry Carmichael has assembled 6,318 American trade cards from the chromolithography boom of 1880 to 1905.
The Quiet Archive of American Rural Photography
Outside Fayetteville, Arkansas, the retired schoolteacher Estelle Crane has spent twenty-six years assembling 11,200 anonymous American snapshots from rural life between 1910 and 1955.
Forty Years of Fountain Pens, One Collector in Portland
Lillian Yoshimoto of Portland, Oregon has assembled 814 fountain pens manufactured between 1888 and 1965. She uses about fifteen of them in regular rotation.
A Pewter Collection Built From House Clearances
Over thirty-eight years, the Edinburgh ironmonger Hamish Brae has built a pewter collection of 1,140 pieces, almost entirely from house clearances within forty miles of his shop.
A Private Collection of Stereographs, 8,400 Cards
In a converted dairy barn in Mendocino County, California, Marcus Olwen has spent forty-one years assembling one of the largest privately held stereograph collections in the American West.
A Single-Collector Cookbook Archive, 1880 to 1950
Eunice Tarr of Providence, Rhode Island has assembled 3,612 American cookbooks published between 1880 and 1950. She has read about half of them and has cooked from about two hundred.
A One-Room Museum of American Carpenter's Tools
In a converted icehouse outside Brattleboro, Vermont, Wendell Strauss has built what may be the most complete private collection of American carpenter's hand planes between 1840 and 1925.
Sixty Years of Buttons, A Collector in Rockland, Maine
Margery Lindholm has kept her button trays in the same parlor cabinet since 1965. There are now seventeen trays, and she knows the provenance of about six hundred of the pieces by memory.