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Archive

H. Louise Chamberlan (library staff) and Charles Newcomb Baxter (library assistant) outside at the Granary Burying Ground, 1912.

Priscilla H. Fowle, on the fourth floor, reference, 1921-2.

Art class on the 5^th floor, 1929

Staff, including Librarian Charles Knowles Bolton, playing croquet at Pond Hill, Shirley, on 30th of June, 1920.

Library staff with Librarian Charles Knowles Bolton on the 5th floor terrace in 1923.

Etta Lebreton Rabardy, Linda Frobisher Wildman and Mable F. Barnum sitting in the Granary Burying Ground in 1912.

Standing left to right: Gerald, Light, Bowie, Johnson, unidentified. Sitting left to right: Graham, Keith and Chamber on the 5th floor terrace on the 10th of April 1917.

The Athenæum maintains not only its own but also the institutional archive of two earlier Boston cultural institutions, the Anthology Society and the Boston Library Society; the Boston Library Society merged with the Athenæum in 1939.

The Boston Library Society records include information on early members, catalogs, and reading lists from this early Boston institution. The Anthology Society records chronicle the evolution of a small group of scholars who became the founders of the Boston Athenæum. As the founders and proprietors of the Athenæum were also the dynamic builders of Federal Boston, the Athenæum archive preserves crucial records relative to 18th- and early 19th-century literary and cultural development in the city. Taken together, this archive provides a complete and unbroken record of Boston’s cultural development from 1792 to the present day.

For inquiries about the archive, please contact Carolle R. Morini , the Caroline D. Bain Archivist, Reference Librarian.

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