It would be difficult to overstate the significance of the contribution of 19th-century American authors to the literary canon—even more so when one is tasked with writing a short, prefatory remark to a bookseller catalogue. After all, what is there for one to say about Dickinson, Emerson, Twain, Hawthorne, Poe, Thoreau, and Whitman that hasn’t already been said?

Our aim for this installment in our ongoing revisiting of our inventory, then, is to examine the variety of ways in which the work of those seven authors has been interpreted by book artists, printers, and illustrators. And the wide array of miniature editions included here demonstrate that a book needn’t be large to be impactful. Here we examine the enduring influence these writings have had on the imagination of subsequent generations of artists and designers, offered during a time when we seek guidance and inspiration wherever we can.

Since the advent of printing from movable type in the western world, the Bible has never been out-of-print. In its nearly six-century print run, this foundational text has taken many forms, the smallest of which have long been a focus of ours. In fact, the recent acquisition of a trio of important eighteenth-century thumb Bibles served as the impetus behind this list: joining the first illustrated edition of John Taylor’s Verbum Sempiternum and two fugitive derivative editions of John Harris’s History of the Bible is a wide-ranging group of items that spans the centuries: from a tiny Lord’s Prayer in a silver locket, to a French devotional for children in an elaborate contemporary red morocco binding. Their diminutive size makes miniature books more personal, and therefore, more our own, and there is no better example of this than the thumb Bible carried by a young soldier through the American Civil War, which can be found here.

We are pleased to offer a well-balanced collection of books on the subject of paper decoration—from marbling in all its forms, to paste-paper. The bulk of the material in this collection came from the library formed by Charles A. Rheault, past president of the Society of Printers, and an old friend and longtime customer. Charlie worked at Riverside Press in his early years as a printer, where he also, according to his own notes, spent some time in the bindery marbling the edges of the giant unabridged Webster’s Dictionary. That experience formed the basis of his interest in marbling, and he sought out books outlining techniques for paper decoration, the history of the craft, and sample books from well-known marblers and paste-paper artists, such as Karli Frigge, Christopher Weimann, and Claire Maziarczyk.