The John Askin Family Library: A Fur-Trading Family's Books by Agnes Haigh Widder John Askin, [1739]-1815, was a well-known eighteenth-century fur trader in Michigan and the Great Lakes region. He and his family possessed a library, the contents of which have not yet been fully studied. Works in the Askin library reveal the family's intellectual and cultural interests, attributes that we do not traditionally associate with people in the fur trade. When we picture the lives of early fur traders in the Great Lakes region, we envision Native-American women paired with Euro-American men of action, noted for their physical strength and endurance, undertaking long trips on water and through the woods, enduring a rough existence amid isolated wilderness with few possessions or creature comforts. This picture is for the most part accurate, but it is an incomplete one for the Askins. As well as being a fur trader, John was a prominent citizen, landowner and speculator, farmer, merchant, shipper, justice of the peace, commandant of militias, and supplier of goods to British army posts.1 A study of the books in their library will help us understand this prominent family more fully and enhance our understanding of cultural possibilities on the Michigan frontier in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.2 Michigan Historical Re view 33:1 (Spring 2007): 27-57 ?2007 by Central Michigan University. ISSN 0890-1686 All Rights Reserved. 1 John Clarke, hand, Power, and Economics on the Frontier of Upper Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2001); David R. Farrell, "Askin (Erskine), John," Dictionary of Canadian Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), 5: 37-39; John Gram, "John Askin at Michilimackinac," unpublished manuscript, June 1995, Mackinac State Historic Parks Library, Mackinaw City, Mich. The last source is the most detailed biographical study of Askin to date. 2 Joan Shelly Rubin, "What Is the History of the History of Books?" Journal of American History 90 (September 2003): 555-56. Book history examines the range of written communication in books, newspapers, periodicals, manuscripts, and ephemera, aswell as the social, cultural, and economic history of authorship, publishing libraries, literacy, literary criticism, reading habits, and reader response. It is a flourishing specialty; multivolume works on the history of the book inAmerica, Canada, Great Britain, Wales, India, and Australia have appeared in the past few years. See Patricia Lockhart Fleming, Gilles Galuchan, and Yvan Lamonde, eds., History of the Book in Canada, vol. \, Beginnings to 1840 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004); and Hugh Amory and David D. Hall, eds., The Colonial Book in theAtlantic World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), which are particularly pertinent to this article. 28 Michigan Historical Review Until now, only two library collections from early Michigan have drawn scholarly attention: those of Father Gabriel Richard, 1767-1832, Roman Catholic Sulpician priest at Detroit beginning in 1798, and the Reverend John Monteith, 1787-1868, Presbyterian minister and teacher of languages, who came to Detroit in 1816. IntellectualUfe on theMichigan Frontier TheUbraries ofGabriel Richard and JohnMonteith, edited by Leonard A. Coombs and Francis X. Blouin, Jr., describes and critiques these collections. As Richard and Monteith were both clerics, their collections differed significandy from the Askins's. The present article illustrates how the books owned by the Askins, a fur-trading and business family, reflected both their leisure-time reading interests and their need for information. Furthermore, the Askins's collection existed a full quarter century before Father Richard appeared in Detroit, pushing our knowledge of the types of books collected in Michigan back nearly twenty-five years. Though born inNorthern Ireland, John Askin spent most of his adult life in the western Great Lakes region. His parents, who were Northern Irish of Scots descent, a shopkeeper and a clergyman's daughter, died when he was a child, and his maternal grandfather raised him at Dungannon, Northern Ireland. In 1758 or 1759, when he was nineteen or twenty years old, he immigrated to British North America. The firm Kennedy and Lyle employed John to sell supplies to the British army during the Seven Years' War. When Askin came toDetroit in 1763 he was the commissary in charge of...