Shared by the Redwood Library

In the early modern era the term almanac initially denoted small, yearly calendrical pamphlets containing a range of practical tabular information: tides, astronomical indications, weather and seasonal forecasts etc. Before their eclipse in the mid-19c., every American town with a printer produced an almanac. In Newport, it was Benjamin Franklin’s brother James who printed the […]

Beatrice Greenough, of the prominent Newport family, worked at the Redwood as a librarian, and in 1962 donated her family collection of largely French and Italian seventeenth and eighteenth illustrated books first amassed by her grandfather, the francophile Beaux-Arts architect Whitney Warren. Comprising over 200 titles of the rarest illustrated festival books, custom limited editions, […]

Purchases often satisfy more than one of our collecting areas: here early American architecture and the history of Newport & Rhode Island. The book is a bound compilation of the first two volumes (26 issues) of the periodical The Architectural Sketch Book (Boston: Osgood & Co., 1873-1875). As per its title, the magazine was designed […]

The Redwood’s aim to be a comprehensive resource for researchers in architectural history, colonial to Gilded Age, involves systematic acquisition of period materials that can inform both scholars and craftsmen, and help us–like they did for their original 19th-c. audiences–better appreciate Newport’s many remarkable historic structures. Some early American architectural books as this new purchase […]

With early modern architecture one of the Library’s five key Special Collections areas, the Redwood aims to be an indispensable resource for researchers, historians and restoration architects. This two-leaf pamphlet in its original blue wrappers gives the wholesale pricing in dollars & cents of lumber in Boston for the year 1805, extremely valuable historical information […]