There once was a time when pretty much everyone on Planet Earth grew up, lived and died within a few miles of their place of birth.
That time has long since passed in the industrialized nations of the world, and with it has passed much of the rootedness that characterized such life: a well-developed sense of place, to which one and one's neighbors belonged and with which every single resident's well-being and livelihood were intricately intertwined.
Much ink has been spilt these past few centuries over the negative consequences to modern industrial societies of humankind's increasing disconnect from the land, but it is not our purpose in this post to recapitulate that battle. Rather, we want to examine a means whereby some book collectors try to recapture that lost sense of place...by collecting local histories:
A private library of local histories can be quite small, if focused on an obscure village that chroniclers of history have largely bypassed, or quite large, if one's village grew into a town, then into a city, then into a megalopolis. If the latter, one's private library of local histories may well expand to include such ancillary materials as city directories and telephone books; biographies of families and/or individuals that are/were prominent in one's local area; local business, church and cemetery records and histories; publications of local historical societies; records and histories of local governments; and so forth:
All of this is quite familiar to genealogists, who are among the most fervent collectors of such books and related materials, though admittedly many genealogists are much more interested in lines of kinship than they are in local history per se, even where such lines of kinship are geographically quite restricted.
For the most part, many of these local histories and ancillary materials can be added to one's personal library quite inexpensively. In fact, they frequently are encountered as discards at local library and friends-of-the-library book sales, as well as occasionally turning up at yard and garage sales. Much of one's luck in inexpensively obtaining such books depends on whether or not one lives in an area with an active local history tradition, such as is the case in most of Great Britain and in certain areas of the United States such as New York and Pennsylvania:
One has to approach all such histories with a degree of caution, since virtually none were written by professionally-trained historians. Accordingly, while the extraordinary natural beauty, charming architecture and other memorable assets of a local area may in fact be more or less objectively conveyed, things like grinding poverty, narrow-mindedness and less commendable characteristics often are somewhat...understated. (This also is true of much of the elegiac fiction produced about such places.)
If you are interested in building a private library around this topic, a great place to start is by contacting one's local historical society for a list of books that may have been published regarding the locale(s) in which you're interested. Many of these historical societies have an online presence, and some have gone so far as to digitize local histories for their area:
- Alberta (Canada) Heritage Digitization Project
- British Local History Online
- Illinois Harvest (Digitized Collection of Illinois Local Histories)
- Inventory of Heritage Organisations In Europe (Portal to European Local Histories)
A simple Internet search will reveal many more such resources.
Local histories are much beloved by collectors of the book arts, as such histories often contain exemplars of a wide variety of early illustrative techniques such as woodcuts, steel engravings and the like:
Whatever one's reasons for collecting local histories, one will find the pursuit worthy of much sustained attention....
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