Thursday, June 11, 2020

What? Not Another Update!


Well, yes, another update.

Don't get me wrong; it's annoying me, too! I mean, I've got plenty of other projects that I'm working on right now (some of them not even about heraldry!). But what am I supposed to do? I go searching on the internet for something, and I happen to run across another source for coats of arms and crests used in what is now the United States of America.

Should I just ignore it? Well, no. That would actually defeat the purpose of collecting American personal heraldry into a single, searchable, database.

So there we are. Just a day after posting an update to the American heraldry collection, and while looking for something else entirely, I ran across another previously unknown (to me) source: American Book-Plates: A guide to their study by Charles Dexter Allen and published in London in 1895. (Fortunately, I didn't have to actually buy a copy; since it is out of copyright, it was digitized and available for download. If you'd like a copy for yourself, do a search for that title on Google Books at https://books.google.com/ or the Internet Text Archive at https://archive.org/index.php or the Hathi Trust Digital Library at https://www.hathitrust.org/)

So there you have it. I stopped working on all of the other stuff that I have going on to download American Book-Plates and go through it and add all of the armorial bookplates illustrated therein (the author is not a herald, and gives no blazons for any of the bookplates he has as examples) to my American Heraldry Collection. Some of the entries were duplicates, having seen them in one of the early sources for the Collection, Bolton's American Armory. Some of the entries were near duplicates, but with one or more details differing, got their own separate entry in the Collection. Still others were not already seen, and so were obviously given their own entries.

Anyway, it's all done now. (At least until I happen to stumble over yet another previously unincluded source.) As usual, I have uploaded the newly-updated American Heraldry Collection as a .zip file to my website, and you can download it by clicking on the AHC link in the left-hand column under "Articles I Have Written".

Enjoy it while you can; there's just no telling when I might find something new to add. (Though whenever that happens, I will as usual make an announcement here and in one or more of the heraldry Facebook groups.)

Now to get back to my other projects!

2 comments:

  1. A good herald's work is never done. :)

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    Replies
    1. No, it isn't. ("I can't die yet! I still have uncompleted projects.")

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