Author: Cambridge Historical Society

Publisher: Forgotten Books

Published: 2016-07-11

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 9781333040963

Excerpt from Publications, Vol. 5: Proceedings, January 25 October 25, 1910 For every sin of management there are a dozen sins of use in publishing historical material. It is one thing to collect, and quite another to publish. The necessity for collecting printed matter has been much restricted in recent years by the growth Of the public library. The necessary tools of workers and the rare or unusual are proper Objects Of a collecting society. Yet even here there are limitations. Why, for example, should the Massachusetts Bistori cal Society, or this Society, seek to Obtain the rarities of New England history by purchase, when copies are available in the Boston Public, in Harvard University, in the John Carter Brown and in the American Antiquarian Society libraries? These rarities cost from $50 to $1000, and no one short of a millionaire can hope to gather even a small number of them in a lifetime Of ardent collecting. The Massachusetts Historical Society has directed its means towards publishing, and wisely; for many a society has been burdened with a few very good pieces, buried in eccentrically geo graphical situations, where they cannot be seen and their very exist ence is almost unknown; and many a one has been crippled at the outset by this ambition to have and to hold costly rarities. The mere possession and its cost have reduced them to a condition of helplessness in publishing. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.