We are pleased to announce the latest round of rare shoe titles to be digitized and added our Internet Archive webpage! For the past two years, the Special Collections Department has been working with the Boston Public Library and the Internet Archive hub there to digitize the rarest shoe titles in our collections, making them available online for the first time.
We now have 14 titles in the Internet Archive digital collection, ranging in topics from early catalogs, to technical illustrations of shoe machinery, to highly specific shoemaking manuals. Haverhill, a.k.a. the Queen Slipper City, was a shoe industry giant – not only famous for making shoes, but also for creating specialized shoe machinery, acquiring and processing fancy shoe leathers, developing shoe showrooms and merchandizing, and a variety of other shoe-related activities.
We are lucky that the rich shoe history of Haverhill is reflected in our Special Collections, and we are delighted to make these rare titles available to all.
More Special Collections information is always available in our corner of the HPL website: https://haverhillpl.org/special-collections/