In November of 1876, a conference of representatives from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia met to establish common rules for the emerging American version of football. This meeting resulted in the formation of the Intercollegiate Football Association and a set of rules that compromised between Harvard’s early form of rugby called “the Boston Game,” allowing tackling and carrying of the ball, and the version of soccer that was popular at Yale, Princeton, and other American colleges at the time. 

A few days after that conference, on Thanksgiving Day, Yale and Princeton met at Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey, and played the first game under the Intercollegiate Football Association’s rules. The tradition of Thanksgiving football was born.

In the agreed method of scoring these first intercollegiate games, a goal (a ball kicked between the uprights and over the rope stretched between them) would count as four touchdowns. The teams consisted of fifteen players, and they adopted the oblong rugby ball rather than the round soccer ball used in the Harvard-Yale football game the previous year.

Princeton and Yale continued the tradition of playing each other on Thanksgiving Day from 1876 through 1893. The two teams, supported by students and alumni of the two universities, met in or around New York City to play their big game (which frequently determined the National Championship) in front of crowds that swelled from 4,000 to 40,000 fans.

As media coverage of the annual Princeton-Yale game spread, other college and high school football teams across the country followed suit and scheduled rivalry games for Thanksgiving Day. Although clergy and faculty sometimes condemned football’s disruption of what was supposed to be a national day of solemn gratitude, the game’s popularity overcame those objections, and football became part of America’s Thanksgiving tradition.

In 1879, the Intercollegiate Football Association tweaked its rules to reflect the changes in gameplay that had come to distinguish American football from English rugby. For example, in rugby, the ball can pop out of a scrum randomly to either team, but the American game introduced a set offense with one team in clear possession of the ball. The offensive players took positions at the line of scrimmage and ran designed plays after a “snapback” released the ball backwards to the quarterback.

Books within the Library’s collections document the game’s evolution. An 1879 rulebook provides the first glimpse of the American innovation of the “snapback,” when the center lineman pops the ball backwards from the line of scrimmage. In Henry Chadwick’s Handbook of Winter Sports, rule 32 reads: “A scrimmage takes place when the holder of the ball, being in the field of play, puts it down on the ground in front of him.” Previous printed versions of rule 32 stipulated that a player with the ball must “drive it in the direction of the opposing goal line.” By deleting this part of the rule, the backward “snapback” was now legal. This revision to the rules formalized American football’s abandonment of rugby’s “scrum” in favor of a new, more strategic approach to the “line of scrimmage.” This subtle early change to the rules led to the development of ingeniously designed offensive plays (and equally complex defensive schemes to thwart them) as seen in the game today. 

The importance of the “snapback” was highlighted in American Football (1891), written by Walter Camp, a former Yale player widely regarded as the “Father of American Football.” Camp writes, “the feature of the American game in distinction from the English is, just as it was within a year from the time of adoption of the sport, the ‘outlet of the scrimmage.’ In this lies the backbone to which the entire body of American football is attached.” Camp goes on to explain the advantages of the “snapback” from the line of scrimmage over rugby’s random scrum: “the element of chance being eliminated, opportunity is given for the display in the [American] game of far more skill in the development of brilliant plays and carefully planned maneuvers.” In short, the “snapback” allowed a team on offense more time and space to execute set plays. Camp’s book, with its mix of football history and strategic concepts useful to players and coaches, became immediately popular and was released in multiple editions in 1891, 1893, 1894, and 1896. 

Prior to the involvement of professional printers and publishing networks, football’s rules were only published in small print runs by local printers or college newspapers such as the Yale Courant, the Princetonian, the Harvard Advocate, or the Harvard Crimson. With the popularity of Thanksgiving Day football and a rising general interest in the game, a readership emerged for rulebooks printed for wide distribution. In 1883, the American Intercollegiate Football Association allowed Wright & Ditson, a sporting-goods store in Boston, to publish the rulebook for sale across the United States. Print culture assisted football’s growth beyond college competition as children’s books, such as The Sports and Pastimes of American Boys (1884), published football’s rules along with an introduction to the sport. As this new game was evolving year to year, having the most up-to-date rules in wide print distribution was crucial to the spread of a standard, accepted version of the game from the Northeast into the South and Midwest. Across the nation, notable rivalries began with games scheduled around Thanksgiving, including Michigan vs. Notre Dame in 1887, UNC vs. Duke in 1888, and Army vs. Navy in 1890. On Thanksgiving Day in 1893, Howard University charged admission to spectators who turned out in droves to watch the Bison stomp an all-star team of local DC athletes by a score of 40-6. 

Lead by Walter Camp, the Intercollegiate Football Association (IFA) held annual conventions to continue tweaking the game’s rules. For example, the IFA reduced the teams from fifteen players to eleven in 1880. The original “down-and-distance” rule was instituted in 1882, giving teams three downs to advance five yards. This innovation compelled weaker teams to try to advance the ball rather than endlessly stalling and hoping for a 0-0 tie. The rule allowing the forward pass wasn’t introduced until 1906.

Until 1885, football’s rules required a “maul in goal” to occur if the ball-carrier crossed the goal line but the defenders prevented him from touching the ball down onto the ground. In these situations, all other players cleared out of the end-zone except for the ball-carrier and any defenders who had their hands on him as he crossed the goal line. The “maul in goal” was basically a wrestling match or fight between the ball-carrier and these defender(s). It ended one of three ways: 1) when the offensive player somehow got himself free enough to touch the ball down to the ground, 2) when the defender(s) stripped the ball from the ball-carrier for a turnover, or 3) when the defender(s) were able to push, pull, or carry the offensive player back outside of the goal line. The hand-to-hand combat of a “maul in goal” could last up to fifteen minutes!

Because of the frequent injuries to players during a “maul in goal” and its delay of regular gameplay, the Intercollegiate Football Association revised the rules in 1885 to eliminate the requirement of a ball-carrier to touch-down the ball in favor of awarding a touchdown as soon as the ball broke the goal line.

If you are planning to include a backyard Turkey Bowl in your celebration of Thanksgiving, it is always prudent to establish the rules at the outset of the game: One or two-hand-touch? Two or three completions make a first down? Five or seven “Mississippi” before a defender can rush the quarterback? And the holiday meal later in the day will probably be more pleasant if you agree to play without the “maul in goal” as part of the rules of the game. 

Sources and Further Information

Camp, W. (1891). American Football. New York: Harper & Brothers.

Campbell, E. C. (1903). “Foot Ball at Howard.” The University Journal, vol. 1, no. 2. Washington D.C.

“Celebrating 145 Years of Thanksgiving Day Football.” www.footballarcheology.com

Francisco, F. (2016). Evolution of the Game: A Chronicle of American Football.

Nelson, D. (1994). Anatomy of a Game: Football, the Rules and the Men Who Made the Game. University of Delaware.

Tamte, R. (2018). Walter Camp and the Creation of American Football. University of Illinois.

Click here to subscribe to Bibliomania and never miss a post!

Thomas was no stranger to intimidation from British authority. In the protests against the 1765 Stamp Act, he participated in a demonstration involving the hanging of an effigy representing a British “stamp-master.” When Thomas refused to give up the names of others involved in the “Liberty Tree” demonstration, the British authorities threatened to jail him. He successfully fought against his arrest in court. 

Beginning in 1770, Thomas published a weekly newspaper called the Massachusetts Spy, devoted to printing political “common sense in common language” for a readership of working-class Americans. The Spy became known for rousing revolutionary sentiment, and Thomas’s printing shop, which often hosted meetings of the Sons of Liberty, was labeled a “sedition foundry” by the British. Thomas later noted (referring to himself in the third person) that “several attempts were made by the government of the province to prosecute the printer, but without effect.” Indeed, in 1771, the British Royal Governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson, summoned Thomas to appear before the colony’s Royal Council. When Thomas repeatedly refused this summons, he established the legal precedent that the British could not arbitrarily compel a colonial subject to testify without a written warrant. Although Isaiah Thomas won that battle, it set him and his printing press at war with the British authorities.

In the face of British threats, Thomas secretly removed his press from Boston on April 16th, 1775. Two nights later, on April 18th, Thomas was part of Paul Revere’s network of midnight riders sounding the alarm that the British army was on the move. The next day, April 19th, he joined the militia of minutemen that clashed with British troops in the Battle of Lexington. The day after that battle, April 20th, he set up his printing press in Worcester, Massachusetts and made ready to publish his firsthand account of the Battles of Lexington and Concord in the May 3rd issue of The Massachusetts Spy. In short, Isaiah Thomas’s printing press amplified the shot heard round the world.

Thomas remained a fixture of American printing and publishing for decades. His printing operation in Worcester began with the single press that was rowed stealthily across the Charles and grew into a sophisticated network of sixteen presses, a paper mill, one-hundred and fifty employees, and a chain of bookstores across the colonies, including branches in Boston, Walpole, Albany, and Baltimore. Benjamin Franklin, a master printer himself, called Isaiah Thomas “the Baskerville of America.”

Thomas’s printing career began when, as a six-year-old, he was apprenticed to Zechariah Fowle. He learned to compose blocks of type before he had even learned to read, setting up the text for a New England Primer that sold 10,000 copies when he was only eight years old. His career continued as a journeyman printer with stops in in Halifax, Nova Scotia, then Portsmouth, New Hampshire, down to Charleston, South Carolina, and eventually back to Boston.

In addition to The Massachusetts Spy, Thomas published an almanac, numerous pamphlets, and, beginning in January of 1774, an intellectual journal called The Royal American Magazine. This monthly publication featured engravings by Paul Revere, poetry by Phyllis Wheatley, and essays on topics such as women’s education, the history of Massachusetts, and moral virtues. Although Thomas claimed that the magazine “had a handsome list of subscribers,” he was only able to publish The Royal American Magazine for six months, and the arrival of the war ended it for good.

Thomas was also prolific in his printing of books, publishing over 250 titles under his imprint. He was innovative in his use of illustrations; indeed, 25% of the books Thomas published included either woodcuts or metal engravings.

Many of these illustrated editions are within the list of 65 children’s books Thomas published. He believed in the importance of providing children with educational “instruction with delight.” For example, his reprinting of A Little Pretty Pocket Book (1787) utilized woodcut illustrations and whimsical verse to make learning fun. 

Published in 1788, A Curious Hieroglyphick Bible is another of Thomas’s most notable children’s books. This book was marketed for children as “an easy way of leading them on in reading.” By substituting words in the text with illustrations, the young reader puzzles out patterns of language and can check their guesses with the full text printed at the bottom of each page. With a total of nearly 500 woodcut illustrations, this amusing volume was among the most heavily illustrated books of its day. Thomas’s innovative design for A Curious Hieroglyphick Bible taught children the stories of the Bible while also developing their reading skills as well as their facility with interpreting images. 

When Thomas retired from his career in printing, publishing, and bookselling, he wrote The History of Printing in America, published in 1810. This seminal work leveraged Thomas’s firsthand knowledge of the people and moments that defined American printing in the nation’s earliest years, and it also relied heavily on Thomas’s exceptional collection of Americana and the research he had conducted into the history of American print culture behind those items. In 1812, Thomas founded the American Society of Antiquaries, known today as the American Antiquarian Society, when he donated his personal library of 8,000 items of Americana (books, newspapers, ephemera, and maps) along with a building in Worcester to house the collection. He served as the AAS’s President until his death in 1831. 

Through his printing of the Revolution’s historical record, his contributions to the emerging and distinct culture of the United States, his wide-ranging collecting practices, and in building a network of bookstores across the United States, Isaiah Thomas created an American legacy of creating, recording, and preserving the history of the new nation. 

Sources and Further Reading

American Antiquarian Society. “Isaiah Thomas’s Printing Press.” americanantiquarian.org

Amory, H. and Hall, D. (Eds.) (2000). A History of the Book in America. Cambridge University Press.

Boynton, H. W. (1932). Annals of American Bookselling, 1638-1850. New York.

Lacey, B. (2014). “The Illustrated Imprints of Isaiah Thomas.” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 104, part 2. American Philosophical Society Press. 

Nichols, C. L. (1900). “Some Notes on Isaiah Thomas and his Worcester Imprints.” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society. americanantiquarian.org/proceedings.

Thomas, I. (1810). The History of Printing in America. Isaiah Thomas, Jr. Worcester.

York, N. (1995). “Tag-Team Polemics: The ‘Centinel’ and His Allies in the ‘Massachusetts Spy’.” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Third Series, Vol. 107. Boston.

Click here to subscribe to Bibliomania and never miss a post!

Special thanks to the Library’s Multimedia Group for their skill and expertise in bringing these films to life!

We will continue to add to our America 250 series in the runup to July 4th, 2026, but here are the pieces that we have produced in our most recent filming sessions:

Early Baseball in Print

Baseball was a popular game from the very beginning of the United States, but it was played by local rules that varied across the country. The mid-19th century explosion of print culture, however, allowed for standardized rules to turn a neighborhood game into a shared national pastime. This film presents a few of the Library’s earliest printed items related to baseball’s rules and cultural importance.

Charlotte Temple: America’s First Bestseller

Originally published in London in 1791, Susanna Rowson’s tragic novel Charlotte Temple became one of the most popular books in the early United States. The Library of Congress’s Charlotte Temple collection reflects the enduring popularity of the book and the deep emotional connection that generations of readers felt to this story of a young English girl seduced and abandoned by a British soldier during the American Revolution. This film introduces this novel and presents a few of the Library’s most interesting copies.

The First American Architectural Handbook

Printed in Deerfield, Massachusetts in 1797, The Country Builder’s Assistant by Benjamin Asher is the first architectural handbook written by an American author specifically for rural American builders. This film explains how Asher’s little book offered a uniquely American approach to architecture.

Thomas Jefferson’s Mouldboard Plow

Thomas Jefferson was a statesman, farmer, and Enlightenment thinker. These three parts of his identity come together in his innovative design for a mouldboard plow and his publication of the plans for how to build it. This film explains the ideals and practical application of Jefferson’s “mouldboard plow of least resistance.”

The Sky’s the Limit: Amelia Earhart and the National Woman’s Party

Written by American aviator Amelia Earhart (1897-1937) but compiled and arranged by her husband after her fatal flight, the copy of “Last Flight” in the National Woman’s Party Library in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division has a special provenance linking Earhart to the women’s suffrage movement. This film tells the story of Earhart as a writer, aviator, STEM educator, and advocate for women’s rights.

The French and Indian War and the Shaping of American Identity

The French and Indian War is often cited as a prelude to the American Revolution, and items from the Library of Congress’s collections reveal how the colonists’ experience of that conflict began shaping, and sharpening, a uniquely American identity. This film explores a few printed artifacts from the beginning of the French and Indian War.

Tiny Creatures, Big Impact: Bugs and American Science

Discover how the study of insects helped establish American science on the global stage. From Thomas Jefferson’s defense of American nature to Thomas Say’s groundbreaking American Entomology, this video explores how bugs shaped U.S. history and identity in the 19th century.

The New England Primer

Parents in the colonial period were eager to teach their children to read.  The New England Primer taught children their ABCs, entertained them with illustrations, and taught them about the world around them. This film explores the content and methods of this very popular early American teaching tool.

At the age of 21, Washington volunteered to lead six men on a mission across the Alleghany Mountains to scout out French military positions and to hand deliver a letter from the Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, Robert Dinwiddie, demanding that the French abandon their forts and depart from lands claimed by the British Crown. Although inexperienced, Major Washington was ambitious and physically robust enough for the 500-mile journey across the snowy, mountainous terrain of the Western wilderness. 

In the daily journal Washington kept during the expedition, he recounted the many obstacles and complications that this expedition encountered: it rained or snowed nearly every day for a month and a half, their horses became so exhausted that the men had to dismount and carry their packs on foot, they got ambushed and shot at by French allies in the woods, and Washington fell into the frigid waters of the icy Alleghany River. Major Washington’s journal also noted that when he finally met French officers, they drank so much wine that they admitted their plans “to take possession of the Ohio” and even revealed the locations of their forts. 

When Washington returned to Williamsburg on January 16^th, 1754, Gov. Dinwiddie asked Washington to spend that night preparing his personal journal of the expedition into a report for the full government of Virginia. The young Major had no idea that his personal journal would be distributed up and down the American Colonies and reprinted as a pamphlet in London. The Library’s copy is indeed one of those printed in the capitol of the British Empire.

The Journal of Major George Washington‘s account of the French expansion into the Ohio region convinced the Board of Trade in London to defend British claims by establishing a fort at the forks of the Ohio (present day Pittsburgh). When Gov. Dinwiddie needed an officer to lead 200 soldiers across the Alleghenies to build this fort and to expel the French forces, Washington again volunteered and was appointed Lieutenant Colonel to lead this mission during the spring and summer of 1754.

As with his first expedition, Washington kept a regular journal of his activities and experiences. In this journal, he recounted a skirmish that took place when his troops discovered a group of French soldiers eating breakfast. One of these French soldiers, Jumonville, was on a diplomatic mission to deliver a letter to the British and was wounded in the skirmish. A Native American chief allied with the British took a hatchet to Jumonville’s skull. A massacre of other wounded French soldiers ensued.

When Washington’s forces were later defeated at Fort Necessity, Washington signed a document of surrender that admitted to the “assassination” of Jumonville. Assassinating a diplomat is an act of war. In short, Washington provided the French with justification for initiating the French and Indian War (the American theater of the global Seven Years War). 

Embarrassingly, Colonel Washington accidentally left his journal behind when he evacuated Fort Necessity, and the French found it. Washington’s journal was sent to Paris, translated into French, and published by the Royal Press of France in 1756 as part of the larger collection titled Memoire Contenant le Precis Des Faits Avec leurs Pieces Justificatives, or A Memorandum Containing a Summary of the Facts With their Supporting Documents.

One of the Library’s three copies of this book must originally have been owned by someone close to the French royal family — the leather binding bears the gilt seal of the House of Bourbon (three fleur-de-lis encircled with a chain).

So, the next time you squirm about what you may have written in your own adolescent journals, be grateful that they haven’t been published in multiple countries or used to instigate a global conflict. Yet. 

Click here to subscribe to Bibliomania and never miss a post!

Along these lines, the Library of Congress’s Rare Book and Special Collections Division is excited to share a few of our ongoing education outreach initiatives. Through the Rare Book Classroom, our new educational space, we offer enrichment opportunities to teachers and students both on-site and via online access.

The Rare Book Classroom is prepared to host student groups of all ages – from kindergarten through graduate school – for hands-on experiences related to papermaking, the operation of a printing press, woodcut and copperplate engravings, and the composition of text out of individual pieces of movable type. Our division’s blog, Bibliomania, has published a series of posts over the past few months that introduce these elements of the material history of the book, and the Rare Book Classroom allows visitors to the Library to experience firsthand some of those book-making processes.

In addition to hosting demonstrations related to the materiality of books, we also frequently curate displays of items from our collections related to the course content of a visiting class. For example, we might present selections from the Daniel Murray Pamphlet Collection to college students studying African American archival history, or we might show early editions of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass to a local high school class studying 19^th century American poetry. Think of these visits like a fancy show-and-tell of rare materials. The experience of students seeing and learning the history behind the first edition of a book they are studying is often electrifying; the physical artifact inspires a sense of continuity and kinship with the people who centuries ago composed its words as well as the skilled workers who brought the book into the world. It is our privilege to share the Library’s treasures whenever possible.

For teachers and students unable to visit the Library in person, we are very glad to host remote displays of the Library’s collections using a high definition document camera integrated into video meeting interfaces. This technology allows classes from around the United States to see materials related to their curriculum. For example, a 9^th grade English class might enjoy seeing the typographical layout of a favorite passage from Macbeth as printed in Shakespeare’s 1623 First Folio. Or an 11^th grade American History class might like to see and learn about Paul Revere’s engraved illustration of the 1770 Boston Massacre.

As part of the Library’s celebration of the upcoming 250^th anniversary of the United States’ founding, the Rare Book Division has partnered with the Library’s Multimedia Group to produce a series of short films that present collections items related to American history and culture with particular focus on the Founding Era. These films are freely available online, and we hope that teachers and students of American history and literature might find them interesting. We have plans to accompany many of these films with supplemental classroom packets – watch this space!

If you are interested in learning more about these offerings or would like to plan either an in-person or remote visit, reach out by submitting a note via our Ask a Librarian interface. Please direct your note to Patrick Hastings, the Education Outreach Specialist for the Library’s Rare Book and Special Collections Division.

Of course, the Library also has a range of online resources freely available to support educators and students, including:

• Searchable Online Collections: Access the millions of digitized books, pamphlets, images, broadsides, manuscripts, and maps that the Library has within its online catalogue.
• Primary Source Sets: Explore curated sets of digitized primary sources related to particular topics (including one for each of the fifty states).
• Research Guides: Dig into resources related to a broad range of research topics.

If you or a teacher you know might find these resources helpful, please share the word!

In 1944, American author Esther Averill’s first book in the Cat Club series was published by Harper publishers: The Cat Club; or, the Life and Times of Jenny Linsky.

In School for Cats (1947), the second volume of the series, Jenny is sent to school in the countryside while Captain Tinker is away at sea.  Again, she’s shy and limits her interactions with other cats, especially Pickles, the cat who usually lives in a fire station and who enjoys scaring other cats at the school.  When it’s time to go to bed, Pickles terrorizes her with his hook and ladder truck until Jenny runs away.  Before she leaves permanently, she ponders disappointing Captain Tinker and all the great experiences she’ll miss at school, and she returns.  In the end, she gathers her courage, confronts Pickles, and they become friends.

The remaining books in the series continue with similar themes and occasionally introduce new characters such as Pickles the Fire Cat and Tom the Hotel Cat.  Reading these stories, it becomes apparent why they appeal to children: they address universal challenges and emotions, such as belonging, curiosity, bullying, homesickness, loneliness, friendship, fear, and shyness.  Illustrations drawn by Averill are plentiful, accessible, and charming.  Averill received the New York Times Best Children’s Book of the Year Award for Jenny’s Birthday Book in 1954.

Esther Holden Averill was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1902.  As a teenager, she worked as a cartoonist for a local newspaper before attending Vassar College and graduating in 1923 with honors.  Following graduation, she served briefly as an editorial staffer for Women’s Wear Daily but moved to France in 1925.  She found work in Paris as an associate for a decorative arts photojournalist, writing captions for stories on fashion, literature, and music.

In 1929, she began working for an American stationery company selecting modern French designs, which is where she was introduced to Lila Stanley and Russian illustrator and future Caldecott award winner Feodor Rojankofsky.  Rojankofsky showed them an ABC book that he had produced in Warsaw and Averill and Stanley were astounded by the colorful illustrations.  Despite knowing little about publishing and children’s literature, they became determined to publish a children’s book illustrated by Rojankofsky.  In 1931, Averill and Stanley founded the Domino Press and published their first title: Daniel Boone; les aventures d’un chasseur américain parmi les peaux-rouges with color illustrations by Rojankofsky.  It was a great success, and the press continued publishing children’s books until their last title, Tales of Poindi, in 1938.

Averill returned to the United States three years later in 1941, took up residence in New York City’s Greenwich Village, and soon began working for the New York Public Library’s children’s section.  Her interest in producing children’s books hadn’t waned, and she combined her cartooning skills and love of cats to create the story of Jenny and the Cat Club.  The series was loved by millions of American children and became Averill’s most popular children’s books.  The cats who appear in her books were based on her own cats, or cats she knew, and the venues within the stories are largely from Greenwich Village and New York City.  Many of these titles are still in print today through New York Review Books, and HarperCollins continues to publish Fire Cat as part of their “I Can Read” series.

Esther Averill passed away in New York in 1992.  She left the literary rights to all her works and those of the Domino Press to the Library of Congress.  Royalties from the publication and sales of her stories replenish the Children’s Literature Gift Fund, which in turn funds additional acquisitions of rare children’s titles.  The Rare Book and Special Collections Division holds first editions of every title in the Cat Club series, as well as other children’s book titles written by Averill.

List of Titles in the Cat Club Series with Links to Their Catalog Records

The Cat Club (1944) – https://lccn.loc.gov/44003239

The School for Cats (1947) – https://lccn.loc.gov/47030683

Jenny’s First Party (1948) – https://lccn.loc.gov/48005694

Jenny’s Moonlight Adventure (1949) – https://lccn.loc.gov/49008288

When Jenny Lost Her Scarf (1951) – https://lccn.loc.gov/51011654

Jenny’s Adopted Brothers (1952) – https://lccn.loc.gov/52007849

How the Brothers Joined the Cat Club (1953) – https://lccn.loc.gov/53007592

Jenny’s Birthday Book (1954) – https://lccn.loc.gov/54006589

Jenny Goes to Sea (1957) – https://lccn.loc.gov/57009261

Jenny’s Bedside Book (1959) – https://lccn.loc.gov/59008963

The Fire Cat (1960) – https://lccn.loc.gov/60010234

The Hotel Cat (1969) – https://lccn.loc.gov/74077941

Captains of the City Streets (1972) – https://lccn.loc.gov/72076500

Sources and Further Reading

“Jenny and The Cat Club: A Fictional World Based in the Real Greenwich Village,” from Off the Grid Village Preservation Blog.  Posted January 10, 2024, by Dena Tasse-Winter.

https://www.villagepreservation.org/2024/01/10/jenny-and-the-cat-club-a-fictional-world-based-in-the-real-greenwich-village/

“Esther Averill” on Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esther_Averill

Esther Averill Collection, Children’s Literature Research Collections, University of Minnesota.

http://special.lib.umn.edu/findaid/xml/CLRC-1214.xml

Esther Averill Papers, Special Collections at The University of Southern Mississippi (de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection).

https://specialcollections.usm.edu/repositories/4/resources/36

How has your passion for public scholarship shaped your journey to the Library of Congress?

Ashley:

My passion for public scholarship has been the throughline of my career. I’ve always believed that history should be accessible and meaningful beyond the academy—that it should invite people into conversation about who we are and how we got here. Whether I was curating public programs at the Smithsonian, interviewing with and writing for outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post, or speaking with community groups, I’ve been motivated by a desire to connect rigorous research with broad audiences.

That commitment is what drew me to the Library of Congress. The Rare Book and Special Collections Division houses extraordinary materials that can spark curiosity and dialogue, and I see my role as helping those resources resonate with as many people as possible. Arriving here feels like a natural extension of the work I’ve always loved—bringing history to life in ways that are engaging, inclusive, and meaningful.

 

Has writing your own book influenced the way that you assist others with their research projects?

Ashley:

Absolutely. Writing my forthcoming book, Nourishing Networks: The Public Culture of Food in New Orleans, was a life-changing but challenging journey. Years of archival research taught me firsthand how exhilarating discoveries can be—and how overwhelming the process sometimes feels. Along the way, I came to deeply appreciate the guidance and generosity of archivists and librarians who answered countless questions and pointed me toward materials I might have otherwise overlooked.

That experience gave me both empathy and gratitude. I know what it’s like to wrestle with sources and deadlines, and how transformative it can be when someone on the other side of the desk offers thoughtful guidance. I carry that spirit into my role at the Library of Congress, where I’m excited to support scholars and writers as they make their own discoveries.

 

 

What authors or experiences sparked your initial interest in American history?

Ashley:

My earliest inspiration came from my parents. My father, a historian and retired high school teacher, instilled in me a love of the past and a respect for the power of education. My mother, a trailblazing food entrepreneur in the gourmet grocery space, taught me through her example that innovation and perseverance are forces that not only drive individual success but also shape the broader currents of American life. Their careers and values guided me toward my own path as a historian with a special interest in the history of food, culture, and society.

That path eventually led me to serve as the Historian of the Smithsonian Food History Project at the National Museum of American History. For seven years, I engaged the public in conversations about the nation’s history through the lens of food—a theme that connects us all. During these programs, we covered a myriad of topics including the American Revolution, the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad, the advent of Major League Baseball, and the Space Race. Those experiences prepared me to interpret the broad sweep of American history here at the Library of Congress, where I’m especially eager to highlight the richness of our collections as we approach the nation’s 250th anniversary.

Do you have a favorite example of humor in food history?

Ashley:

One of my favorite examples comes from the streets of New Orleans, where food vendors often used humor to attract customers. Street cries could be playful, clever, or a little silly—like the vendor who sold artichokes and sang out, “I got arti-CHOKES by the neck!” Moments like that always make me smile, but they also reveal something deeper: these entrepreneurs played a vital role in feeding urban America, using every tool—including wit—to connect with their communities. It’s a fun reminder that humor has long been part of marketing strategies in the food world and beyond.

What have you found most inspiring in your first month in the Rare Book Division?

Ashley:

Without a doubt, it’s the passion and expertise of the Rare Book and Special Collections team. They are brilliant, generous with their knowledge, and bring tremendous enthusiasm to their work. From rare book displays shared with visitors to public programs celebrating the art of modern book making, it’s inspiring—and refreshing—to see such creativity and dedication in action. I feel proud to be joining this dynamic group.

One of my favorite experiences so far has been asking colleagues to take me on what I call “stacks adventures.” Walking through the rare book stacks with them, hearing about their favorite collections, and learning the pearls of wisdom they’ve gathered over the years has been extraordinary. Some of the stories behind these books are so powerful that I’ve found myself genuinely moved. Those moments are a vivid reminder of how alive and meaningful the history in our collections remains.

What is the best way to connect with you?

Ashley:

Please feel free to reach out through the Rare Book and Special Collection Division’s Ask-A-Librarian. That way, I can send resources, links, information, and easily connect you with other specialists at the Library.

Click here to subscribe to Bibliomania and never miss a post!

Although Eliot was never truly a member of the Bloomsbury Group, he was attracted to this association of interesting writers, artists, and intellectuals. He found them cool and subversive, nonconformists existing confidently and comfortably within the larger English culture. The Bloomsbury Group were conscientious objectors to World War I, sexually liberated, and proponents of a vibrant aesthetics. While Eliot was often around the Woolfs and their Bloomsbury friends in London, his social stiffness prevented him from truly fitting in. Many in the group found him “dull,” overwrought, and acerbic. Nevertheless, the Woolfs admired Eliot’s work and agreed to publish seven of his poems in a pamphlet printed on the Hogarth Press that they operated out of their home.

The Hogarth Press began as a Woolf domestic hobby, something to occupy the married couple most weekday afternoons. They purchased their small press, about the size of a large typewriter, in 1915, and set it up in their kitchen. Virginia Woolf, who suffered bouts of mental illness throughout her life, discovered that the focused yet disassociated act of setting type was soothing to her nerves and offered a satisfying distraction after a day spent writing her own fiction. In 1917, the Woolfs decided to use their little handpress to publish works written by their acquaintances and by a few promising unknowns; over the next fifteen years, the Hogarth Press, run by Virginia and Leonard Woolf, two amateur printers with a savvy eye for good writing, would hand-print and publish 34 books and pamphlets.

T.S. Eliot’s Poems, published in 1919, was only the Hogarth Press’s third publication, and Virginia described the 13-page pamphlet as “our best work so far by a long way.” They printed fewer than 250 copies, which sold out within a year. The text is clearly legible and centered on the page — a major accomplishment for a novice printer such as Leonard Woolf.

For the book’s wonderful cover, the Woolfs selected patterned Japanese paper that they sent to Paris to be individually decorated by Pamela Fry, the seventeen-year-old daughter of Roger Fry, a Bloomsbury painter, critic, and designer. She marbled the paper in orange and then added green, black, and brown paint in a textural style that predicts abstract expressionism. The green paint was dripped in a manner similar to the technique Jackson Pollock would make famous thirty years later, and the black and brown paint is applied with brush dabs and sweeping flourishes. The effect is striking, especially given that the individualized decoration meant that each cover in the edition was unique. The book’s title, glued onto this cover, was printed in a Caslon Old Face type that Leonard Woolf specifically purchased for this project.

Eliot maintained close contact with the Woolfs for years after the publication of Poems, which was only his second publication and served as something of a validation of his early work.

As Eliot’s relationship with the Woolfs developed between 1918 and 1924, Virginia’s diary captures her thoughts about him. She regarded Eliot with curiosity, “as if one were making out a scientific observation,” she wrote. Their relationship was not often warm, but they seem to have entertained each other and met frequently. When she saw him a month after finishing printing his Poems, she wrote, “I amused myself by seeing how sharp, narrow, & much of a stick Eliot has come to be.” Elsewhere in her diary, Virginia Woolf gossips about Eliot getting drunk while hosting a dinner party, about him wanting to be called “the Captain,” and about him wearing macabre green powder makeup. Ultimately, she does not trust him: “the sinister and pedagogic Tom cut a queer figure. I cannot wholly free myself from suspicions about him.”

But this testy relationship did not prevent the Woolfs from agreeing to publish Eliot’s poem, “The Waste Land.” Eliot performed one of his first readings of the new poem for the Woolfs in June of 1922, and Virginia noted the occasion in her diary: “Eliot dined last Sunday & read his poem. He sang it & chanted it, rhythmed it. It has great beauty & force of phrase: symmetry; & tensity. What connects it together, I’m not so sure. One was left, however, with some strong emotion. The Waste Land, it is called.” The poem’s hypnotic quality remains powerful for readers today, even after a century. The Woolfs would print and publish it a year later.

The circumstances surrounding the Hogarth Press’s publication of The Waste Land represents modernism as a dynamic social and economic movement as much as an artistic one. It demonstrates the driving tension between contemporary innovations in international marketing and antique systems of patronage and production. It reflects a networked system of strategic processes, collaborations, and transactions among a cultural elite that cohere into a new vision for the masses to consume. Modernism produced a shareable, popular language that made sense of the early 20^th century.

The Hogarth Press’s edition of The Waste Land, however, reversed the typical process of an artistic community promoting values to a mass market. In some ways, The Waste Land achieved mass-market popularity before it was niche. As detailed in a previous Bibliomania blog post, The Waste Land had already appeared three times within a year of the publication of the Hogarth Press’s British edition in September 1923.

The Boni & Liveright first edition enjoyed immense popularity, selling out the first run within two months and quickly reaching 5,000 copies sold. These sales figures attest that the poem became a cult phenomenon, especially among disaffected undergraduate students in 1920s America. To this new generation, The Waste Land offered an edgy intellectualizing of post-war angst. Such mass popularity was only possible via Boni & Liveright’s capacity for mass production.

By contrast, the Hogarth Press’s subsequent, small-scale edition directly contradicted the impersonal nature of large-scale industrial printing operations, favoring instead a quirky, humanized, even joyfully artistic production process. The Hogarth Press served a different sensibility with its individualized covers and an obvious handcrafting that bordered on sloppiness. Notice the thick glue evident beneath the title. Very indie. Each copy’s cover is a unique variation of blue marbled paper glued to boards, and there were three different versions of the title: one with the text boxed with asterisks (as in the Library’s copy), one with single rules above and below the text, and one with the text alone. Such whimsical production characteristics distinguish a limited-edition Bloomsbury book from a uniform, industrial mass printing.

Eliot himself preferred the Hogarth edition to the Boni & Liveright, writing to Virginia Woolf, “I am delighted with The Waste Land which has just arrived. Spacing and paging are beautifully planned to make it the right length, far better than the American edition. I’m afraid it gave you a great deal of trouble.” Indeed, it had. Eliot’s poem, with its use of multiple languages, varied line indentions, and footnotes, was the most challenging text that the amateur printers had yet tackled. Indeed, Virginia expressed her exhaustion upon completing the job on July 28, 1923: “We have finished Tom, much to our relief.”

The Hogarth Press edition did not achieve the commercial success of the Boni & Liveright edition – it took a year and a half for the Woolfs to sell 443 copies – but that wasn’t really the point. Rather, the Woolfs provided Eliot with a different form of cultural capital through their associations with Bloomsbury and a subversive London avant–garde.

Sources & Further Reading:

Ackroyd, P. (1984). T.S. Eliot: A Life. Simon and Schuster.

Eliot, T.S. (2011). The Letters of T.S. Eliot Vol. 2: 1923-1925 (V. Eliot and H. Haughton, Ed.). Yale.

Matthews, S. (Ed.). (2022). The Waste Land after One Hundred Years. Cambridge University.

Southworth, H. (Ed.). (2010). Leonard and Virginia Woolf, the Hogarth Press, and the Networks of Modernism. Edinburgh University.

Rosenbaum, S. P. (Ed.) (1975). The Bloomsbury Group: A collection of Memoirs, Commentary, and Criticism. University of Toronto.

Woolf, L. (1967). Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919 to 1939. Harcourt.

Indeed, T.S. Eliot had been suffering against his era for at least a year, lamenting to a friend that “the whole of contemporary politics etc. oppresses me with a continuous physical horror like the feeling of growing madness in one’s own brain. It is rather a horror to be sane in the midst of this; it is too dreadful, too huge. It goes too far for rage.”

Channeling these feelings of disillusionment, Eliot had just finished writing his longest and best poem to date, “The Waste Land,” and he was confident that its publication would contribute toward the swelling zeitgeist of the modernist movement. Ezra Pound, who helped Eliot revise the poem into its final form, promoted “The Waste Land” as the pinnacle of modernist poetry, promising that it was “as good in its way as Ulysses.” By the end of that Paris dinner, Liveright offered Eliot an advance of $150 on 15% royalties for the right to publish the first edition of “The Waste Land” in the fall.

With the first edition of Joyce’s Ulysses also forthcoming, 1922 promised to be a watershed year for the modernist movement.

But Eliot’s agreement with Boni and Liveright didn’t stop him from also shopping “The Waste Land” to Scofield Thayer, the new co-editor/co-owner of The Dial literary magazine. Note: these negotiations were taking place without either publisher reading the text itself. The poem was being sold on vibes alone.

Thayer was eager for The Dial magazine to publish the poem, sight unseen, but he was unwilling to haggle over the price; by policy, The Dial paid all contributors, whether famous or entirely unknown, $10 per page of poetry. Thayer was only willing to increase his offer to $150, about a month’s pay of Eliot’s salary as a banker. However, Eliot wrote to Pound that Thayer’s dealing had been ungracious, “as if he were doing me a great favour.” The negotiations then broke down over a garbled telegram: rather than asking for £50, Eliot’s telegram read “CANNOT ACCEPT UNDER !8!56 POUNDS.” In response, Thayer pointed out that he and James Watson Jr., his co-editor/co-owner, were “running The Dial with a very large annual deficit: we have had to make personal sacrifices to keep it going. It would not be possible for us to pay higher rates than we already pay to our contributors and to continue in existence.” Indeed, Thayer and his co-owner Watson were both paying around $4,000 out of pocket each month to cover the magazine’s deficits and to keep The Dial spinning. Together, Thayer and Watson were patronizing modernism at the equivalent cost of nearly $2 million annually in today’s money. We might excuse Thayer for a measure of indignation at being pressured to spend more on Eliot’s poem.

Thayer’s business partner, Watson, though, was dismayed that The Dial might miss out on publishing one of modernism’s major works and rekindled the negotiations a few months later. In August, Watson requested that Eliot send him a copy of the poem. Eliot did so, and when Watson finally read The Waste Land, he found it “disappointing.”

Nonetheless, Watson offered to publish the poem on exceptionally good terms: not only would he pay $150 for the poem, but Eliot would also receive The Dial’s annual prize of $2,000 (roughly equivalent to $37,500 in today’s money) in recognition of Eliot’s “service to letters.” This offer was too good for Eliot to pass up, but it was complicated by his contract with Boni and Liveright, which he had signed only three weeks earlier.

Eliot maneuvered beguilingly between these two entangling publication agreements. He suggested to Watson that Liveright “would delay publication as a book until the new year” and then played the other side, claiming that The Dial had “suggested getting Liveright to postpone the date of publication as a book, but I have written to them to say that it seemed to me too late to be proper to make a change now.” Eliot struck a wheedling tone, writing “unfortunately,” “I see nothing but to hope,” and “it’s my loss, I suppose” before finally suggesting “if Watson wants to try to fix it up with Liveright I suppose he can, that’s his affair.”

But Eliot got his way in the end. Watson met with Liveright in New York and agreed to terms, including The Dial‘s commitment to purchase 350 of the 1000 copies of the Boni and Liveright book edition of The Waste Land, which would be delayed a month after the poem’s appearance in The Dial. And here’s the kicker: Eliot also negotiated an agreement that he could publish “The Waste Land” before anyone else in volume 1, number 1 of The Criterion, the literary magazine Eliot himself was preparing to launch.

Ultimately, “The Waste Land” appeared in three separate publications within the span of three months: first in The Criterion on October 16, then in The Dial on October 20, and finally in the Boni and Liveright independent volume on December 1. These interactions took advantage of an emerging network of modernist institutions.

The first edition(s) of “The Waste Land” also benefitted from modern marketing and advertising practices. The Dial magazine, with a monthly circulation of 9,000, pursued a wide marketing campaign for the poem, arranging for it to be displayed prominently in newsstands and bookstalls in all major cities and transit hubs. Similarly, Liveright doubled his normal advertising budget for the launch of the book, and it’s first run of 1,000 copies sold out within two months.

Boni and Liveright’s marketing and packaging of the book leveraged the positive critical reception from the poem’s previous publications in The Criterion and The Dial earlier that fall. 

On the book’s dust jacket cover, Liveright highlighted Eliot’s winning of The Dial’s 1922 award, and the inside flap quoted critics’ positive reviews, one of which called it “the finest poem of this generation.”

In these ways, Eliot’s poem achieved a popularity that made its publication a cultural event. “The Waste Land” quickly became shorthand for literary modernism’s brand of intelligent disillusionment, its creative repurposing of a broken civilization’s obscure fragments.

Ironically enough, The Waste Land became the most fertile ground for planting modernism’s seeds.

Sources and Further Reading:

Ackroyd, P. (1984). T.S. Eliot: A Life. Simon and Schuster.

Eliot, T.S. (2011). The Letters of T.S. Eliot Vol. 1: 1898-1922 (V. Eliot and H. Haughton, Ed.).Yale.

Kirk, R. (1971). Eliot and his Age: T.S. Eliot’s Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century. Sherwood Sugden & Company.

Pound, E., Thayer, S., Watson, J. (1994). Pound, Thayer, Watson, and The Dial: A Story in Letters (W. Sutton, Ed.). University of Florida.

Rainey, L. (1991). “The Price of Modernism: Publishing The Waste Land” in R. Bush (Ed.) T.S. Eliot: The Modernist in History (91-133). Cambridge.

Think back to your earliest memories with books. You’re young, cute, and curious. You might be nestled in the lap of an adult reading to you, or perhaps you’re lying on the floor by yourself, flipping through the pages and looking at the pictures beside the words. From the very beginning, illustrations have been essential enhancements and compliments to the text.

Artists began adding woodcut illustrations to books within years of Western innovations in printing technology and moveable type. The Library has within its collections of incunabula (books printed before 1501) many books that combine text and images, often printed together on the same page.

One of the earliest illustrated books is the Biblia Pauperum (1470), a compendium of select scriptural passages intended to provide devotional material for the common clergy. This block book presents passages from the Old and New Testament accompanied by woodcut illustrations.

Woodcut printing, a technique mastered in China as early as the 3^rd century, was the first method used to print images alongside composed text. The artist would start with a square or rectangular block of wood that was the exact height of a piece of metal type. Into this block of wood (typically pear, plywood, cherry, or birch), artists would use sharp tools to carve the design in relief, meaning that the spaces where they carved into the woodblock would not receive ink and would be the negative, white area of the illustration; the design that remains on the surface of the woodblock after the artist cut away the negative space would be inked and printed. Because the block began as the same height as a piece of type, this uncarved part of the woodblock would remain “type high” and would be inked along with the text to be printed and locked into the same forme as the composed text. 

Some early printed books include hand-painted woodcut illustrations, such as those seen in the Teutch Passion (1490) and Aesop’s Fables (1501). This practice of adding color by hand to each copy of a printed book harkens back to the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages.

Another popular technique of printed illustration is engraving, where an artist uses a sharp tool called a burin to carve an image into a thin plate of metal – usually a soft metal such as copper. The engraver presses the burin into the copperplate to create grooves in the shape of the desired design. The deeper the groove, the darker the line in the eventual image. Artists also employed cross-hatching techniques to create various tones in the composition.

Whereas woodcut illustrations are cut in relief (meaning that what is carved out of the wood is not printed), engraving allows the artist to design the image directly (what is carved out of the copper is printed). This process is reversed because engravings were not printed on the same sort of press used to print text and woodcuts; rather, engravings were printed in a separate process using an intaglio press.

In the intaglio printing process, a leather dauber applies ink deeply into the grooves carved into the metal plate, and the surface is then wiped clean. A piece of paper is positioned on top of the plate, and the plate and paper together are rolled under the tremendous pressure of an intaglio press (like a giant rolling pin). The intense pressure forces the ink in the grooves to release onto the paper. The force involved in this printing process is so strong that it leaves an impression at the edges of where the plate pressed into the paper. Looking or feeling for this impression around the edge of the image is one easy way to identify whether an illustration is an engraving or a woodcut.

Because these illustrations were printed on a different sort of press than those used to print text, these pages were usually printed in a different printshop and were later inserted into the pages containing the text. A bold book designer might send the sheets of printed text to the intaglio workshop in hopes that the copperplate illustration would be added to the correct page in the correct position. 

In the image above on the left, the process of printing a copperplate illustration onto a previously printed page has been accomplished successfully with the correct alignment; the illustration intended for page 81 has been perfectly placed. However, in the image above on the right, the copperplate engraving has been printed on top of the previously printed textual matter. Sometimes, mistakes can tell us more about how a book was made than can perfectly executed techniques.

Similar to engraving, etching is another form of metalcut illustration that uses an intaglio press to print the design. However, rather than the image being carved into the metal with a sharp tool, etching uses acid to burn grooves into the metal. The process begins with a metal plate being covered with a layer of wax or varnish (called a ground) that later acts as a protective barrier between the metal and the acid. The artist uses an etching needle to draw the image by scraping away the layer of wax, exposing the metal beneath. Then, the plate is submerged in a bath of nitric acid and water. The acid burns or “bites” smooth grooves into the plate where the metal was exposed by the scraping of the artist’s needle; where the acid-resistant wax remains, the plate is not affected. If an artist desires tonal differences within the composition, wax can be re-applied to certain areas of the plate before dipping it back into the acid, allowing the acid to dig deeper grooves where the metal remains exposed. Once the artist has created the desired grooves, the layer of wax is removed from the plate with a solvent. Now the plate is ready to be inked and printed on the intaglio press in the same manner as used for engraving.

The etching technique has the artistic benefits of creating smoother, rounder lines and more delicate images. The artist’s ability to create tonal variety allows for more naturalistic detailing, as seen in the clouds, trees, and flora depicted in the etching above. 

Throughout the history of printed text, images have enhanced and supported the reading experience. Hopefully, learning about the artistic techniques used to create illustrations inspires even greater appreciation for the history of the book.

Sources and Further Reading

Brunner, F. (1962). A Handbook of Graphic Reproduction Processes. Niggli.

De Simone, D., ed. (2004). A Heavenly Craft: The Woodcut in Early Printed Books. Library of Congress.

Gascoigne, B. (2004). How to Identify Prints. Thames & Hudson. 

Martin, J. (1993). The Encyclopedia of Printmaking Techniques. Sterling.

Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Etching.” The Materials and Techniques of Drawings and Prints. metmuseum.org.

Werner, S. (2019). Studying Early Printed Books: 1450-1800. Wiley Blackwell.