University Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The Printer's Scrapbook

This collection consists of two scrapbooks of early Illinois imprints dating from the 1840s and 1850s. These scrapbooks were compiled as samples of job printing work done at the Alton Telegraph Office in southern Illinois. Materials include government and financial documents, event invitations and programs, product labels and advertising, and other printed ephemera. Approximately a hundred of the items were cited in Cecil K. Byrd's A bibliography of Illinois imprints, 1814-58 (University of Chicago Press, 1966), but these citations represent only a small fraction of the items preserved in the scrapbooks.