Atlantic Canadian Imprints

Book excerpt: The first comprehensive analytical bibliography of Atlantic Canadian imprints, this volume covers some 320 books, pamphlets, broadsides, government publications, and serials. Most have not been listed before in any bibliography or catalogue. They represent the holdings of more than thirty libraries and archives in the four Atlantic provinces, and in Ontario, Quebec, the United States, and England. Each entry follows the principles of descriptive bibliography and includes full collation, contents, record of paper, type, and binding, analysis of issue and state, and location of every copy examined. Historical notes deal with authorship, printing, publishing, distribution and sales, and with the content of important works and the relationship between items. Arrangement is by province, then by year of publication. The material catalogued encompasses a wide range of subjects. God and government are two of the most common, but there are many others: education, municipal organization, history, elections, transportation, agriculture, legal trials, and a number of societies—benevolent, national, religious, and masonic. There are also many almanacs, including one in German, several satires and addresses in verse, and a French abécédaire. Not surprisingly in a nineteenth-century Maritime bibliography, signal books and decisions about piracy abound. Six indexes provide access by author, title, genre, trades, place of publication, and language. Patricia Fleming’s work continues Marie Tremaine’s A Bibliography of Canadian Imprints, 1751–1800 and supplements that work with new and previously unlocated imprints. It adds an essential element to our understanding of print communication in Atlantic Canada.