All Things Considered

Abstract

National Public Radios Weekend Edition: Saturday introduces its listeners' mail segment with this sound clip: rapid, light typing on the keys of a manual typewriter, punctuated by the bright ping of a small bell as the carriage returns. The sound is instantly recognizable to people my age, calling up memories of term papers and homework assignments. But it has often occurred to me that for my students, unless they grew up in the most eccentric or Luddite of contemporary American households, NPR s auditory cue must be meaningless, as unfamiliar as vinyl records or rotary phones or, a layer down in the technological trash heap, slide rules and sticky bottles of white-out correcting fluid. That trash heap is about to get bigger, fed by discarded sets of Microprint card editions of Early American Imprints, Series L Early American Imprints contains every extant book, pamphlet, and broadside published in British North America from 1639 to 1800, and for a generation or two it has been a mainstay of research for students of seventeenthand eighteenth-century America. It began as the brainchild of Charles Evans, who determined in 1902 to create his American Bibliography, a chronological dictionary of all books, pamphlets, and periodical publications printed in the United States of America from the Genesis of printing in 1639 down to and including the year 1820, with bibliographical and biographical notes.1 Given the scope of this project, it is perhaps not surprising that Evans had reached only the listings for 1799 by the time of his death in 1935. Clifford K. Shipton, the head librarian of the American Antiquarian Society, a mecca for early American research located in Worcester, Massachusetts, completed Evans's catalog through 1800. And then he did something even more important: he arranged with the Readex Microprint Corporation to create a microcard edition of the imprints. The project was launched in 1955 and finished issuing the first series in 1968. It is a safe bet that anyone who has attempted any original research in early Ameri-