A One-of-a-Kind Trove Reveals What 19th-Century American Boyhood Was Really Like
In 2013, Pamela Russell was at an auction house in southern New Hampshire when, she writes, she “stumbled across a flimsy, old shoebox filled with tiny, carefully constructed, handwritten books.” Russell, who works as a curator and educator at Amherst College’s Mead Art Museum, didn’t get too close a look at the collection before she had to decide whether to bid on it, but she knew she wanted to own the books, “if only to be able to spend more time with them.” Russell won the auction and stayed up late looking through the collection, counting more than 60 volumes. This was the Nelson Brothers’ “library”: newspapers, seed catalogs, and storybooks, all authored by the boys. The books are illustrated in careful detail, filled with run-on sentences in all caps, and laid out in imitation of the reading material the brothers devoured in front of the kitchen cook-stove.