AMERICANA – BEGINNINGS.

By ThomasW. Streeter '04. A Selection from the Library of Thomas W. Streeter, shown inhonor of a visit of the Hroswitha Club onMay 3, 1951. Privately printed. 1952. 97 pp.

This very valuable and interesting book of 97 pages described in bibliographic detail seventy-nine items of Americana from Mr. Streeter's extensive collection. The Hroswitha Club is a club of women book collectors limited, I believe, to thirty-five members. Mr. Streeter had planned to issue at Christmas time a catalog of the items which he had selected for their perusal. Much of the exhibit consisted of material relating to contemporary accounts of voyages to America and the beginnings of settlements on the Atlantic and Pacific in the 17th and 18th centuries, and in Arizona and Montana as late as 1860. In addition, Mr. Streeter showed some of his "Beginnings" -the first or early printing of books or broadsides of the various states. All of the seventy-nine items, books and broadsides, some of which are absolutely unique in the strict sense of the term, had labels describing them. When the owner decided to get the material ready for the press he felt that more information than he had already assembled would be desirable and so the descriptions were lengthened considerably and the holdings of thirty different libraries checked for these items.

The first item in the catalog is the Christopher Columbus Letter of 1493. Mr. Streeter devotes two and a half pages to describing this four-page item and to giving the locations of the various existing copies.

Another item represented in the exhibit was the first item besides a newspaper to be printed in New Hampshire An Astronomical Diary: or An Almanack for the year of OurLord Christ, 7757 by Nathaniel Ames, printed in Portsmouth in 1756. Dartmouth College unfortunately does not have a copy of the first issue of this Almanack but has a copy which Mr. Streeter thinks is the second issue.

This bibliography, because of Mr. Streeter's meticulous scholarship, should be of great value to librarians and all collectors of Americana. The printing was limited to 325 copies, of which 50 copies have been set aside for sale through Goodspeed's Bookshop in Boston, Edward Eberstadt's Bookshop in New York, and Henry Stevens, Son & Stiles of London.