Weekly Tours of the American Antiquarian Society

Tours of the Society’s main library building called Antiquarian Hall. Located at 185 Salisbury Street, Antiquarian Hall is the third home to the Society and the site of an eighteenth-century printing press, a collection of antique furniture, portraits, and Staffordshire pottery and twenty-five miles of shelving filled with historic printed materials including a new state-of-the art book vault constructed in 2002. All of these features, plus a short film are included in the free Wednesday tours. 

Recipient of the 2013 National Humanities Medal, the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) is a national research library of American history and culture and a learned Society that offers a wide variety of public and scholarly programs for people of all ages.  The Society preserves and makes available for study, the printed record of what is now the United States from 1640, when the first printing press was established in British North America, through the year 1876, when the United States celebrated its centennial and new copyright laws dictated that one copy of everything printed in this country be sent to the Library of Congress. The AAS collections comprise some four million books, pamphlets, broadsides, newspapers, periodicals, sheet music, and graphic arts material, as well as manuscripts and a substantial collection of secondary works, bibliographies, and other reference works related to all aspects of American history and culture before the twentieth century.  The Society’s holdings of newspapers and imprints created before 1821 are considered the finest in the world.