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The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing

The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing was founded to create a global network for book historians working in a broad range of scholarly disciplines. Research addresses the composition, mediation, reception, survival, and transformation of written communication in material forms from marks on stone to new media. Perspectives range from the individual reader to the transnational communication network. With more than a thousand members in over forty countries, SHARP works in concert with affiliated academic organizations around the world to support the study of book history in all its forms.

Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Online Catalog

Cabinet of American Illustration, Cartoon Drawings: Swann Collection of Caricature and Cartoon, Civil War Photographs Civil War Photographs, Drawings (Master),Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Color Photographs, Fine Prints Fine Prints, Posters: Performing Arts Posters, Stereograph Cards Stereograph Cards, Daguerreotypes, Fenton Crimean War Photographs, Fine Prints: Japanese, pre-1915, Lomax Collection, Panoramic Photographs, Thesaurus For Graphic Materials, Van Vechten Collection, Wright Brothers Negatives, and much more.

THE POPLAR FIELD

The poplars are felled; farewell to the shade;
And the whispering sound of the cool colonnade;
The winds play no longer and sing in the leaves,
Nor Ouse on his bosom their image receives.

Twelve years have elapsed since I first took a view
Of my favorite field, and the bank where they grew;
And now in the grass behold they are laid,
And the tree is my seat that once lent me a shade.

The blackbird has fled to another retreat,
Where the hazels afford him a screen from the heat;
And the scene where his melody charmed me before
Resounds with his sweet-flowing ditty no more.

My fugitive years are all hasting away,
And I must ere long lie as lowly as they,
With a turf on my breast and a stone at my head,
Ere another such grove shall arise in its stead.

'Tis a sight to engage me, if anything can,
To muse on the perishing pleasures of man;
Though his life be a dream, his enjoyments, I see,
Have a being less durable even than he.
William Cowper [1731-1800]