The Mercantile Library Association of Philadelphia, Pa. [interior and exterior views] – Historic Print
![The Mercantile Library Association of Philadelphia, Pa. [interior and exterior views], 1869 — antique engraving](https://images.jameslantos.com/img/fc/fc0427d361fa-L.webp)
(Originally scanned by the Library of Congress. Each image is professionally and digitally cleaned of artifacts such as color bars and extra borders prior to printing.)
Description
Few images capture their era like this antique engraving of The Mercantile Library Association of Philadelphia, Pa. [interior and exterior views]. It comes from the collections of the Library of Congress, scanned from the original and carefully restored.
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The Mercantile Library Association of Philadelphia, Pa. [interior and exterior views]
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The two wood engravings show the Mercantile Library Association of Philadelphia, a subscription library founded in 1821 for merchants' clerks and young businessmen who wanted books and lectures outside their working hours. Both views were drawn from photographs by the Philadelphia firm Wentworth, Taylor & Brown and printed in *Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper* in November 1869. That weekly relied heavily on engravings made from photographs, so the pair offers a useful record of how a civic institution was presented to a national readership in the years after the Civil War. Comparing the exterior with the interior shows how the building's architecture and its reading spaces were meant to project the association's respectability.
| Created / published | 1869 |
|---|---|
| Medium | 2 prints : wood engraving. |
| Subjects | Title and other information transcribed from caption card. Wood engravings after photographs by Wentworth, Taylor & Brown. Illus. in: Frank Leslie's illustrated newspaper, vol. 29, no. 738 (1869 Nov. 13), p. 148. Reference copy may be in SSF (Graphic) - Libraries--U.S.--Penna.--Philadelphia--1869. Caption card tracings: Ph. Ind.; Geogr.; Libraries. |
| Source | Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division |
| Original scan | 1,536 × 594 px · prints to 5 × 2 in at 300 dpi |
| Reference | AMZ-SOTP-HPA-171070 |
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