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Molly O’Hagan Hardy, Bibliographic Enterprise and the Digital Age: Charles Evans and the Making of Early American Literature, American Literary History, Volume 29, Issue 2, Summer 2017, Pages 331–351, https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajx002
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At the end of the nineteenth century, Charles Evans set out to compile the first comprehensive bibliography of printed texts up to 1820 in what would become the US. A librarian who grew up around American books, Evans had a love for such artifacts of early national history that carried him through this arduous task, as did his drive to enumerate these imprints into a single set of volumes. In a speech delivered in October 1921 at the American Antiquarian Society’s (AAS) annual meeting, Evans described in vivid detail his affective relationship to his work, and in so doing, situated himself in the mores that brought this group of men together. Specifically, he identified himself with antiquarianism, a lineage of practice imported from England but made local by the nation’s first collectors of literature printed in the US. His bibliographic work drew on a tradition dating back to the nation’s founding while also setting the course for the ways in which this corpus would make itself available to the next century of students and scholars of the period.