Research Trip to Philly

Thanks to the Royal Historical Society and the Bibliographical Society who provided a modest amount of funding, I spent a week and a half looking at the Archives of the J.B. Lippincott Company in Philadelphia, PA at the HSP. (Website linked from photo above.) Lippincott was the American publisher of Chambers’s Encyclopaedia and for the second edition were Chambers’s partners. I was told about a “hidden” archive at the PHS by Professor Michael Winship.

Besides correspondence with Chambers, Lipincott correspondence files include letters with Blackwood & Sons, Chatto and Windus among other British publishers. They seem to have lots of correspondence with a man named Garmenson who was their agent for UK, based in London. So I may have missed some NLS correspondence directed between Chambers and him. I’ll have to go back and see what’s in the Chambers Archive again at the NLS.

I took about 150 photos regarding correspondence between Chambers & Lippincott directly related to encyclopaedias. I also notice there was other correspondence between both firms on the Chambers Bibliographical Dictionary. I took notes on some, for interest, but no photos as I think this was think out of my scope.

It was interesting to see correspondence between Chambers and Lippincott, because it filled in some of the gaps in my understanding of what was going on during the production stage. For instance, there were arguments related to delays on the Lippincott side, and some of the Chambers letters to Lippincott, though civil, were very angry. When I read the Lippincott side, they explain that extra time is needed to process electrotypes for American printing machines, and they actually give technical answers that are very enlightening.

I also found lots correspondence about copyright. Apparently “third class publishing entities” as Lippincott characterized, them have been cannibalizing the first edition of Chambers and then selling it on cheap paper in competition with the second edition of Chambers’s Encyclopaedia that Lippincott was trying to sell. This answers some of the questions raised in my 5 February 2015 post.

I also discovered on this trip that two Lippincott titles, At Home Abroad and A course on Zoology: Designed for Secondary Education used images from Chambers’s Encyclopaedia and Lippincott paid for electrotypes and permission to use the images. I also found some correspondence related to interest from Lippincott’s contacts in Mexico for a Spanish translation of Chambers Encyclopaedia second edition for Mexican market. This is interesting because indicates how influential the Encyclopaedias were world-wide, and that they were a good brand at that point in time. I'm not sure whether the translation happened, and it is outside the scope of my research, since it would have been in the early 20th century, but I'd be curious if anyone happens to know the answer to that.