"The Weekly Rake", 1842, now at the Grolier Club

[George Thompson]

The Antiquarian Society made a 3-reel collection of their holdings of
ephemeral NYC newspapers that they called "Racy Papers" -- they made it to
protect the originals from overuse, and apparently won't sell copies --
with the result that these films aren't to be found in NYC, nor the
original newspspers.  (As of a couple of years ago, when I last checked.)

I had these films in hand through Interlibrary Loan on several occasions,
and as always read the stories that purported to be news emanating from
NYC.I didn't read the fiction or the stories from beyond the Pale that
separates NYC from the barbarians  You will have noticed before this that
my approach is, if something was done outside of New York, they needn't
have bothered.    I made notes on the slang encountered and posted the
interesting stuff here, sent all items noted to the OED & Jonathon Green.
 To JL, too.

There was a book about these papers: The Flash Press: Sporting Male
Weeklies in 1840s New York, by Patricia Cline Cohen et al, U. Chicago Pr,
2008.  The final 100 pages are extracts from The Whip, The Flash, The
Libertine, The Rake ("devoted to agricultural pursuits, as the title
indicates" (or words to that effect) -- a disclaimer by its editors after
the authorities began to bring heat against these papers).

GAT

On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 12:51 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:

> Now appearing in "In Pursuit of a Vision," an exhibit of the
> collections of the American Antiquarian Society at the Grolier Club,
> NYC -- "The Weekly Rake" (New York), an issue from 1842.
>
> The review in the NYTimes, Sept. 12, says it "had, the show tells us,
> 'frank coverage' of sexual services and practices, 'spiced with
> appropriate advertising and crude but titillating illustrations'. ...
> the society, we learn from the informative catalog, has an 'enviable
> collection'."
>
> Might be a good source of (in)appropriate terms for some dictionary.
>
> Apparently a fascinating, wide-ranging exhibit of the AAS's
> collection of (mainly) documents -- books, pamphlets, newspapers,
> broadsheets, ephemera, etc. -- from the 18th and 19th centuries.
>
> Joel
>
> ------------------------------**------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



--
George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much since then.

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org