Photograph showing remnants of hand-made brown paper book covers with hand-lettered spines on Foreign Library copy of Honoré Gabriel Riquetti, Comte de Mirabeau, Mémoires Biographiques, Littéraires et Politiques (Brussels: J. P. Meline, 1834-1836), in eleven volumes.  Original volumes in photograph from the CFPL Peabody Books (part of the Vault Collection), gift of Elizabeth Peabody, 1878.  Stevenson photograph—gift of Richard Stevenson, 2004—from the CFPL Photofile.

In his A New England Boyhood, Edward Everett Hale commented that the books in Elizabeth Peabody’s Foreign Library “stood on shelves in brown-paper covers.”  The set of Mirabeau shown in this photograph confirms the use of the homemade covers that Hale recalled.

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This image may not be reproduced in any form, including electronic, without permission from the Curator of the William Munroe Special Collections, Concord Free Public Library, Concord, Mass.