The Book Madness: Charles Deane and the Boston Antiquarians

A discussion of research into a hub of bibliomaniacs associated with the early years of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Among the circle of learned historians, friends of dusty research and poetry, were George Livermore, Charles Deane, Alexander Young, and Edward Crowninshield. Livermore was fond of bibles and illustrated and large paper copies, and Deane kept minutes of his painstaking bibliographic and historical research on fly-leaves, margins, memoranda, and scraps of paper scattered between the pages of his 13,000 books. Together, these amateur men of letters provide a unique outlook on the culture of book collecting and the formation of private and public libraries in mid-19th-century America.