[With Publisher’s ALS to Benson Lossing:] Birthday and Autograph Album.

“[T]o systematize the collection of autographs in a more permanent form than upon loose bits of paper…”

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Unrecorded in OCLC, an 1874 de luxe birthday and autograph album published by Henry T. Clauder of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

The blank album is in a full morocco binding with fancy gilt titling on spine and on both boards and with all edges gilt. A possibly lithographed, decorative title page is also seen. The album includes a separate page for every day of the year and there are 22 pages at the end, perhaps for notes or additional autographs.

Accompanying the album is a letter from the album’s publisher, Henry T. Clauder, presenting the volume to historian and popular author Benson J. Lossing (1813–1891). Clauder writes to Lossing in the latter’s capacity as “Editor Historical Records.”

Clauder appears to be trying to bring an updated birthday album to the influential man’s attention or perhaps to gain Lossing’s endorsement of it:

I send you by mail a copy of the Birthday & Autograph Album which I introduced to your notice when in Bethlehem a few years ago as the Birthday Book securing your autograph in my Book… [P]utting forth the B & A Album may have the tendency to systematize the collection of autographs in a more permanent form than upon loose bits of paper, & in a manner too in connection with Birthdays, that may make them more highly prized by their possessors.

A Publisher’s Weekly article informs that Clauder began his publishing career in Bethlehem in 1868 with his brother, Amos C. Clauder, as agents of the Moravian Publication Office. Clauder’s present letterhead (from after his brother’s death) lists him as the sole agent for the Moravian Publication Office and the publisher of three weekly or bi-weekly newspapers: The Moravian, The Little Missionary, and the German-language Der Brueder Botschafter.¹

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