Jay T. Last Collection of Printing and Publishing: Louis Prang Archive

The Jay T. Last Collection of Printing and Publishing: Louis Prang Archive contains over 3,650 items dating from 1857 to 1916, with the bulk of the items spanning from 1860 to 1897. This archive chronicles the business history of Boston lithographer Louis Prang through art prints, advertisements, printed volumes, and promotional ephemera produced by L. Prang & Co. and its successor companies: Prang Educational Company and Taber Prang Art Co. The archive also contains catalogs, certificates, price lists, business records and correspondence, personal letters and photographs, news clippings, and original art considered for lithographic reproduction.

Materials are broadly divided into two series: printed materials (primarily items produced by or for the business) and manuscript materials (primarily items documenting business operations and the personal life of Louis Prang). Series I is further divided into three subseries: small size prints and ephemera (11 x 14 inches or smaller), large size prints and ephemera (larger than 11 x 14 inches), and hardbound volumes. Small-size items 8 x 10 inches or smaller are described broadly at the series level; large-size items and most small-size items between 8 x 10 inches and 11 x 14 inches in size are fully inventoried with printers, artists, and publishers indexed by name. The collection includes over 260 large-size items comprised mainly of lithographic art prints produced by L. Prang & Co. Small-size items number approximately 3,200 and contain a variety of materials including album cards, trade cards, calendars, booklets, catalogs, greeting cards, proof books, sample books, clippings, and small-format lithographed prints. Hardbound volumes number approximately 40 and include illustrated books with verses, art instruction texts, and children's natural history educational books, as well as Prang's pinnacle achievement, Oriental Ceramic Art, a sumptuously lithographed catalogue in ten volumes featuring Asian ceramics from the collection of Baltimore businessman William T. Walters (1820-1894). Series II contains mainly manuscript business correspondence, as well as memo and stock books, letters patent certificates, personal letters, and a small number of photographs. The bulk of the material is in English, but a small amount of correspondence is written in German.

The collection provides a resource for studying the business and output of one of the most influential major lithographic firms in the United States in the 19th century. The images provide information about American tastes and culture as well as the evolution of advertising strategies in the 19th and early 20th centuries. As graphic materials, the prints offer evidence of developing techniques and trends in printmaking, and of the artists, lithographers, printers, and publishers involved in the creative process.