With alphabetical indexes of firms and trade specialties.

The idea of this women's magazine originated with Samuel Williams, a Cincinnati Methodist, who thought that Christian women needed a magazine less worldly than Godey's Lady's Book and Snowden's Lady's Companion. Written largely by ministers, this exceptionally well-printed little magazine contained well-written essays of a moral character, plenty of poetry, articles on historical and scientific matters, and book reviews. Among western writers were Alice Cary, who contributed over a hundred sketches and poems, her sister Phoebe Cary, Otway Curry, Moncure D. Conway, and Joshua R. Giddings; and New England contributors included Mrs. Lydia Sigourney, Hannah F. Gould, and Julia C.R Dorr. By 1851, each issue published a peice of music and two steel plates, usually landscapes or portraits. When Davis E. Clark took over the editorship in 1853, the magazine became brighter and attained a circulation of 40,000. Unlike his predecessors, Clark included fictional pieces and made the Repository a magazine for the whole family. After the war it began to decline and in 1876 was replaced by the National Repository. The Ladies' Repository was an excellent representative of the Methodist mind and heart. Its essays, sketches, and poems, its good steel engravings, and its moral tone gave it a charm all its own. -- Cf. American periodicals, 1741-1900.

Michigan in Literature is a guide to more than one thousand literary and dramatic works set in Michigan from its pre-territorial days to the present. Imaginative, narrative, dramatic, and lyrical creations that have Michigan settings, characters, subjects, and themes are organized into sixteen chapters on topics such as Indians in Michigan, settlers who came to Michigan, diversity in the state, the timber industry, the Great Lakes, crime in Michigan literature, Detroit, and Michigan poetry. In this most complete work to date, Clarence Andrews has assembled the literary reputation of a state. He illustrates, with a wide variety of literary works, that Michigan is more than just a builder of automobiles, a producer of apples and cherries, a supplier of copper and lumber, and the home of great athletes. It is also a state that has played—and continues to play—an important role in the production of American literature. To qualify for inclusion, a work or a significant part of it has to be set in Michigan. Andrews shows how novelists, dramatists, poets, and short story writers have created their particular images of Michigan by using and interpreting the history of the state—its land and waters, people, events, ideas, philosophies, and policies—sometimes factually, sometimes modified or distorted, and sometimes fancied or imagined. Biographical information is featured about authors, editors, and compilers, who range in fame from Ernest Hemingway and Elmore Leonard to persons long forgotten. The published opinions and judgments of reputable critics and scholars are also presented.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1885.