Ragged Soldier Sutlery and Vintage Volumes

Harper's Weekly

This publication really isn't a book but it certainly is a reproduction of a period publication. Although there had been some reprints of Harper's Weekly in the past, this version certainly deserves a second look. Printed on acid-free paper, it is very high quality.

The large pictures demonstrate the unusually high quality of this reproduction. In the technology of the time period, pictures were produced by sending an artist to an event. After the artist made his sketches in the field, he would return and convert the sketches into a finished drawing. The drawing was then divided into pieces, each the size of an engraver's block (about the size of a 3 x 5 card). The journeymen engravers would engrave their part of the picture except for a buffer around the edge. The blocks were then gathered together and a master engraver would join all the images into a single unified picture -- it's no wonder that it sometimes took a couple of weeks to publish a picture! In examining some of the large pictures, it is possible to detect the faint hairlines that sometimes occurred when the engraver's blocks were assembled to make the larger pictures.

The start of the reproduction begins with the November 10, 1860, issue that announced Lincoln's election. It concludes in February 1865.

Single issues of full size reprints are $2.50 each. If you are choosing news for a particular event, remember that during the 1860's it took about three weeks to get the news in print.

Check with us first about availability because the publisher currently have no plans to reprint issues after available copies are gone. Also, although we have some issues (See the list of dates below), we do not keep all of them in stock. We can order issues we don't have but please place your order at least three weeks before you need them to have the best probability of being able to receive them in time.

Another way to obtain the newspaper is through a CD version. The CD contains an entire year of 52 issues, using early November as the starting point so it is not an exact calendar year. The images for the CD were scanned at 300 dpi and the software uses Adobe Acrobat reader (which may be downloaded free here from Adobe) to view the images. The viewer is then able to view any size of the image from an entire page (a bit hard to read any of the text except the headlines) down to such a fine level of detail that the individual pixels and "jaggies" can be seen. By adjusting the field of printing, matching levels of detail from whole page to very large zoomed images can be printed with the amount that can be shown on one sheet of printout limited by the magnification employed.

The cost for a CD that covers approximately one year is $24.95. Check with us for availability and exact coverage of each CD.

Go below the links to other books for the listing of dates we have in stock.

If you want to look at the previous book in the list,
Handmaid to the Arts,
click here

If you want to look at the next book in the list,
Hospital Sketches,
click here

The dates we have as of November 7, 2009 (42 different issues):

December 29, 1860

March 16, 1861
April 27, 1861
June 15, 1861
June 29, 1861
July 20, 1861
October 19, 1861
October 26, 1861
November 9, 1861
November 30, 1861
December 21, 1861
December 28, 1861

March 22, 1862
March 29, 1862
April 5, 1862
April 12, 1862
September 6, 1862

January 3, 1863
February 28, 1863
March 14, 1863
May 23, 1863
May 30, 1863
July 4, 1863
July 25, 1863
August 1, 1863
August 22, 1863
October 24, 1863
October 31,1863
December 26, 1863

February 20, 1864
March 19, 1864
June 4, 1864
June 11, 1864
June 25, 1864
July 2, 1864
June 16, 1864
August 20, 1864
September 24, 1864
October 8, 1864
November 5, 1864
November 12, 1864
December 31, 1864