Philadelphia on Stone Wins Newman Award

The Library Company’s Philadelphia on Stone: Commercial Lithography in Philadelphia, 1828-1878, published in 2012, received the Ewell L. Newman Book Award at the May annual meeting of the American Historical Print Collectors Society. This year the jury bestowed the honor, presented to the best publication promoting the appreciation of historical prints, on the volume edited by Associate Curator of Prints and Photographs Erika Piola as part of a project to comprehensively document commercial lithography in Philadelphia in its first 50 years.

A heavily-illustrated volume, Philadelphia on Stone includes an analysis of the social, economic, and technological changes in the local trade from 1828 to 1878; biographies of premier lithographers P. S. Duval and James Queen; and new insights about genres of lithographs pertaining to book illustration, advertising, sensational news, and landscape imagery. With chapters contributed by Ms. Piola, by Print Department Curator Sarah Weatherwax, and by half a dozen other scholars, the book was the fitting culmination of a three-year-long William Penn Foundation-funded project that also included an online biographical dictionary of Philadelphia lithographers and a digital catalog of their works. We are proud that our book received this recognition from such a noteworthy organization.