We are delighted to announce a new digital collection of rare shoe industry books, available on Internet Archive! The collection is a sample of our shoe industry materials and includes a variety of early shoemaking publications, such as lasting manuals, a treatise on uncommon foot shapes, a shoe manufacturing machinery guide, and a retailer catalog.
The project was made possible by the Library for the Commonwealth program at Boston Public Library and Digital Commonwealth. We submitted an application for digitization following request for remote access to one of our rare books. This title, and the four others selected for the project, are well out of copyright and were previously unavailable online or elsewhere in the United States, so digitization was a wonderful solution. We are happy to have the opportunity to make them freely accessible worldwide!
If you would like to view the titles, they are all together as a Haverhill Public Library collection on Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/haverhillpubliclibrary. The excerpts here also have links to individual titles in their captions.
We hope to expand our digital rare book collection with additional rare titles from our onsite Local History Collection. The titles must have been published before 1923, and not previously available online, i.e., in Google Books, Library of Congress, or the Internet Archive, but if you find a good candidate, please let us know!
More Special Collections information is always available in our corner of the HPL website: https://haverhillpl.org/special-collections/
*Please note that we have moved our evening open hours to Thursdays.