Bibliophemera

Horace Mann gave the lecture. Miss Dana received this printed pamphlet of the lecture: Lecture on the Best Mode of Preparing and Using Spelling-Books, Delivered Before the American Institute of Instruction, August 1841 , by Horace Mann, Secretary of the Board of Education (Massachusetts), was published by William D. Ticknor in Boston, 1841. Here is what I have deduced from the printed copy at hand (and a little Internet research): Sometime during the following year, 1842, Miss Joanna E. Dana was preparing to teach school in West Dedham, Massachusetts's. A friend or colleague sent her a printed copy of this lecture to help her with her spelling instruction. Miss Dana evidently read the lecture and, being the literary person and teacher that she was, corrected an error she found in Mr. Mann's discourse. On page 20, in the paragraph that contains " the knotted cords of the Mexicans ," Miss Dana crossed out " Mexic " and wrote next to it in th...

Here is a postal cover with an embossed one-cent Franklin in blue oval that Ticknor and Company put their logo on and used for correspondence. What I find notable about this cover, other than Ticknor's logo design, is the way it is addressed with as few words as possible--company, city, state. Keystone Phila Pa . And they probably could have gotten away with excluding the state abbreviation. In my collection of postal covers, they take top prize for brevity. There even seems to be some intentional formatting of the address, descending in a stair-step pattern away from the company logo, reminiscent of an e.e. cummings poem ( my favorite here ). If the Wikipedia page on Ticknor is correct, and other sources seem to confirm it is, then Ticknor and Company's roots go back to 1832 when William Davis Ticknor and partner John Allen started a publishing business out of the Old Corner Bookstore in Boston. Through a series of partnerships and buyouts and new start-ups over the next fif...