We buy and sell rare books and manuscripts we believe are worth being collected, studied or enjoyed. These artifacts could be a printed on silk memento of a school in Texas for wayward children, an archive of nineteenth century letters from an Indian Territory, or a rare 18th century book printed in Philadelphia with a spectacular association.

The untold history of the United States is vast. Layers of historical events, from the early American Republic to the 20th century, have yet to be fully understood or documented.

Rare books, manuscripts, pamphlets, ephemera, handwritten diaries and journals — all can document meaningful 18th and 19th century American lives.

We’re interested in all Americans of 18th, 19th, and early 20th century U.S. history—of all genders, ethnicities and ages—the marginalized and the affluent, the stock market investors and the farmers, the quacks and the highly-educated physicians, criminals and learned lawyers, the winners and losers, scientists and inventors and crackpots, merchants, ship captains, children, mayors and presidents, self-liberated slaves and the enslavers.

Teachers, clerics, social reformers and never-to-be-reformed, factory owners and factory workers, prisoners, immigrant laborers, Christians and Jews and atheists, artisans, soldiers and sailor. All are of interest.

Alternative views on American history might be seen within a women’s rights pamphlet annotated by an opponent, an unusual pamphlet on slavery or black history, a photograph of Native Americans visiting Washington, D.C.

You might find this through an unusual handbill advertising the death of Ulysses S. Grant, or a trade catalog for a new railroad car technology that reduces the need for paid labor, or of a little-known communal society setting up in the frontier hinterlands.

Through printed, manuscript, and visual “rare Americana,” our understanding of 18th century and 19th century American history writ large, is enriched, modified, clarified.