Selected Special Collections

Frank J. Hogan Collection

Collection: Instructional texts, early nineteenth-century paperbound books, and rare juvenile American publications, (86 titles).

In 1941 Frank J. Hogan presented 86 rare pieces of juvenilia to the Library. Included in the gift was 1 of 3 known copies of Samuel G. Goodrich's The Tales of Peter Parley about America (Boston, 1827), the first native production which accented entertainment in a child's book as strongly as it did instruction. The Hogan gift also included 10 New England primers, the earliest of which is the very rare Providence edition of 1775, which contains the well-known childhood prayer "Now I lay me down to sleep," and the only known copies of the Boston primer of 1790. Another rarity in the Hogan gift was the earliest American edition of Cock Robin's Death and Funeral (Boston, ca. 1780).