Musées

Musées — marelibri

[Salem - Maritime Trade - Early American Museums] East-India Marine SocietyABAA

The East-India Marine Society of Salem

1831réf. BK0165Salem Massachusetts: Salem Press Palfray Ives Foote & Brown 1831. 78 pp. 8vo. Original printed wrappers. Wrappers frayed at spine; light dampstaining at margins of a portion of the leaves at rear. Good. An early catalogue of the collections of the East-India Marine Society of Salem recording the maritime journals and objects gathered by Salem captains and merchants during the city's great period of overseas trade. Founded in 1799 by captains and supercargoes who had sailed beyond the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn the Society required its members to contribute to a cabinet of "natural and artificial curiosities" the collection from which the present Peabody Essex Museum developed. The Society moved the collection into the newly built East India Marine Hall in 1825 and this expanded catalogue appeared only six years later. The volume includes the Society's act of incorporation bylaws lists of members and officers a catalogue of its manuscript journals of voyages and an extensive catalogue of the museum. The voyage journals occupy pages 33-42 and document Salem voyages to ports throughout Asia and the Indian Ocean; the balance of the catalogue records the ethnographic natural-history and other objects brought home by the Society's members. This was a substantially enlarged successor to the Society's 1821 catalogue which ran to 100 pages; the 1831 edition extends to 178 pages and was followed by a further supplement in 1837. A national bibliography of American library catalogues records copies of the 1831 edition at only a small group of institutional collections.1 1 Robert Singerman American Library Book Catalogues 1801-1874: A National Bibliography Graduate School of Library and Information Science University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 1996 94. . Salem Press, Palfray, Ives, Foote & Brown unknown books