{"id":2763,"date":"2018-05-08T13:21:41","date_gmt":"2018-05-08T17:21:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bookhistory2020\/?p=2763"},"modified":"2018-05-30T22:03:47","modified_gmt":"2018-05-31T02:03:47","slug":"digital-traces-of-the-american-baptist-publication-society-pamphlets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bookhistory2020\/2018\/05\/08\/digital-traces-of-the-american-baptist-publication-society-pamphlets\/","title":{"rendered":"Digital Traces of The American Baptist Publication Society Pamphlets"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0I have been working with \u201cWhy a Baptist\u201d by Wilder Perry, \u201cPrayer and its Relation to Life\u201d By Henry Melville King, and \u201cThe Importance of a Christian Education\u201d by Henry E. Robins this semester<\/a>. These three pamphlets were made by the American Baptist Publication <\/a>Society<\/a>to be distributed to a vast audience<\/a>. They were printed cheaply, and not necessarily as books that you would keep, but meant to spread a message and then be passed on. Finding traces of these books online took me through an adventure in failure of searching the Baptist Historical Society\u2019s archives for records of these books and searching for family libraries from the authors. This lead me to the record of publishing for “Prayer and its Relation to LIfe”<\/a>in The Cumulative Book Index<\/em>, Volume 15<\/em>compiled by Potter and Teich, but I still had no record of my other two works. At this point I turned to amazon and found an out of stock page for “Why a Baptist”<\/a>and twelve buying options for a copy of “The Importance of a Christian Education”<\/a>that were physical copies of a facsimile.<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0One of the biggest struggles I faced when searching for a record of \u201cPrayer and its Relation to Life\u201d is that it\u2019s author Henry Melville King, can easily confise a search engine into pulling up times where the considerably more famous Henry Melville wrote the word \u2018king.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0I finally did find a record of it though, in The Cumulative Book Index<\/em>, Volume 15. <\/em>I found a copy of this list on Google Books, and learned that it was a listing<\/a>published by the H. W. Wilson Company during the twentieth century. The first volume was published in 1898 and the last in 1999. \u201cPrayer and its Relation to Life\u201d can be found<\/a>on page 404 about midway down the first column. It gives the author\u2019s name, the title, and describes the book as \u201can address delivered before the Providence Baptist assn., in the First Baptist church Pawtucket, September 20, 1911.\u201d Neither of my other pamphlets were in this work though, and I can only suppose that this might have something to do with length, \u201cPrayer and its Relation to Life\u201d is considerably longer than the other two works at 40 pages. It was interesting to see that at the time of its publishing this work was seen as important enough to include in this catalogue when, from what I can find, other pamphlets from the American Baptist Publication Society were not.<\/p>\n

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Clip From The Cumulative Book Index<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0While I couldn\u2019t find any digital facsimiles \u00a0of \u201cThe importance of a Christian Education\u201d I was able to find two different physical facsimiles available for purchase on Amazon<\/a>. There was a hard back option available from Scholar Select and a paperback option available from Classical Reprint Series; Forgotten Books. Both of these copies are described as facsimiles that tried to stay as close to the original as possible so they include records of stains, tears, or marginalia. These are all available through third party sellers on Amazon. I found it fascinating that there were groups who were willing to actually print and publish a facsimile, but not anyone willing to make it available online.<\/p>\n

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Back of Paperback Edition<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Back of Hard Back Edition<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0My search for \u201cWhy a Baptist\u201d was the most fruitless of my endeavors. The only online presence that I can find for it is an out of <\/a>stock Amazon page\u00a0<\/a>with the only description referencing an unknown binding and a length of 25 pages. I can however find a record\u00a0<\/a>of the author, Wilder Perry, in an article written about him in a local newspaper called Village Soup in Waldo County Maine. It was written by Barbara F. Dyer in 2010 and gives a brief biography of his life.<\/p>\n

Searching for these books was incredibly interesting, and showed all of the different ways that a book can be traced online, even if a copy of it isn\u2019t available. These pamphlets were religious documents that were made to distribute a message to a vast range of\u00a0people<\/a>\u00a0at the time they were produced. They<\/a>\u00a0were printed cheaply with content that was made to be easy to understand not literary or academic. This is potentially one of the reasons that they have not been considered a text that should be made available online. My search for these documents made me consider the value we place in certain types of print culture of others, and what other documents have been left behind in the new world of digitization.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0I have been working with \u201cWhy a Baptist\u201d by Wilder Perry, \u201cPrayer and its Relation to Life\u201d By Henry Melville King, and \u201cThe Importance of a Christian Education\u201d by Henry E. Robins this semester. These three pamphlets were made by the American Baptist Publication Societyto be distributed to a vast audience. They were […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7831,"featured_media":2764,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[399546,1,399561],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bookhistory2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2763"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bookhistory2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bookhistory2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bookhistory2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7831"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bookhistory2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2763"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bookhistory2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2763\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2922,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bookhistory2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2763\/revisions\/2922"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bookhistory2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bookhistory2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bookhistory2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bookhistory2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}