Discussions are designed to expand the music cataloger's understanding of publishing practices peculiar to sheet music. While much of the content emphasizes the description of the music, there are also sections devoted to subject access to illustrations, first-line/chorus/refrain text, illustrators, engravers, and publishers, and extensive reproductions of title pages from the 18th through mid-20th centuries, accompanied by examples of the cataloging, are also included.

V. 1. The colonial book in the Atlantic world: This book carries the interrelated stories of publishing, writing, and reading from the beginning of the colonial period in America up to 1790. v. 2 An Extensive Republic: This volume documents the development of a distinctive culture of print in the new American republic. v. 3. The industrial book 1840-1880: This volume covers the creation, distribution, and uses of print and books in the mid-nineteenth century, when a truly national book trade emerged. v. 4. Print in Motion: In a period characterized by expanding markets, national consolidation, and social upheaval, print culture picked up momentum as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth. v. 5. The Enduring Book: This volume addresses the economic, social, and cultural shifts affecting print culture from Word War II to the present.

Cumulative index to all three volumes of Literature of American Music in Books and Folk Music Collections.

This volume includes all of the surviving songs by German-American composer, performer, critic, and businessman Herrman S. Saroni (1823/24–1900), who is now most remembered as the owner and editor of Saroni’s Musical Times (one of America’s first significant music magazines). The entire date range of these songs is 1844–89, but the vast majority appeared in the 1840s and early 1850s. Saroni was among the first composers in America to combine aspects of German lieder and various features associated with popular song, and these works fuse accessibility to amateurs with sophisticated compositional techniques. Despite several indicators of success in his era, Saroni’s songs are almost completely unknown today. These works deserve reconsideration and modern performance both for their historical significance and for their aesthetic value. Most of the songs in this edition were published in Saroni’s lifetime, but an appendix includes a transcription of an unpublished holograph manuscript song, the original of which is also shown in two plate images.