Ragged Soldier Sutlery and Vintage Volumes

Harper's Weekly

This publication really isn't a book but it certainly is a reproduction of a period publication. Although there had been some reprints of Harper's Weekly in the past, this version certainly deserves a second look. Printed on acid-free paper, it is very high quality.

The large pictures demonstrate the unusually high quality of this reproduction. In the technology of the time period, pictures were produced by sending an artist to an event. After the artist made his sketches in the field, he would return and convert the sketches into a finished drawing. The drawing was then divided into pieces, each the size of an engraver's block (about the size of a 3 x 5 card). The journeymen engravers would engrave their part of the picture except for a buffer around the edge. The blocks were then gathered together and a master engraver would join all the images into a single unified picture -- it's no wonder that it sometimes took a couple of weeks to publish a picture! In examining some of the large pictures, it is possible to detect the faint hairlines that sometimes occurred when the engraver's blocks were assembled to make the larger pictures.

The start of the reproduction begins with the November 10, 1860, issue that announced Lincoln's election. It concludes in 1865 but many of the 1865 issues, especially after the end of the war, are not in stock.

Single issues of full size reprints are $2.50 each. If you are choosing news for a particular event, remember that during the 1860's it took about three weeks to get the news in print.

Check with us first about availability because I don't think they are going to renew their stock after available issues are gone. Also, we do not keep these in stock but, instead, order them as needed. Therefore, the minimum time for us to order an issue is about three weeks so you definitely need to plan ahead.

Another way to obtain the newspaper is through a CD version. The CD contains an entire year of 52 issues, using early November as the starting point so it is not an exact calendar year. The images for the CD were scanned at 300 dpi and the software uses Adobe Acrobat reader (which may be downloaded free here from Adobe) to view the images. The viewer is then able to view any size of the image from an entire page (a bit hard to read any of the text except the headlines) down to such a fine level of detail that the individual pixels and "jaggies" can be seen. By adjusting the field of printing, matching levels of detail from whole page to very large zoomed images can be printed with the amount that can be shown on one sheet of printout limited by the magnification employed.

If you want to look at the previous book in the list,
Handmaid to the Arts,
click here

If you want to look at the next book in the list,
Hospital Sketches,
click here