Like borrowing a book from a friend, information also tends to travel between institutions. Sometimes, a text is gifted, offered in memorial, purchased, or is simply forgotten. Regardless, having another institutional bookplate helps establish a text’s provenance in both location and time, especially in today’s shifting world of information and conversation. Here are a few texts found in our library that previously had homes in others.
This bookplate, located in Benson John Lossing's book, Pictorial History of the Civil War in the United States of America, belongs to the Mercantile library company of Philadelphia and dates somewhere from 1821 to 1925 where it was demolished and rebuilt.
This copy of James M'Henry's book, The Wilderness, or, Braddock's Times: A Tale of the West, is believed to have provenance from Olivet College’s Library in Michigan prior to 1993. Today, it is known as Burrage Library of Olivet College.
A book containing a list of school names and their current year. The stamp on the left belongs to The Woman's Club of Sewickley Valley which was formed in 1889 as an outgrowth of the General Federation of Women's Club.
Consisting of handwritten school names, the book has a strong provenance as it has moved across various institutions. Despite the lack of information on the schools themselves, we may assume that each use of the book was for a women audience.
