A SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY IN WHICH ARE DESCRIBED 11,620 UNCOMMON AND SIGNIFICANT BOOKS RELATING TO THE CONTINENTAL PORTION OF THE UNITED STATES.

The use of this text by the Americana Exchange, Inc. is licensed from the Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois.

Books confined to the history of the United States as collecting U.S.IANA. This book is to satisfy curiosity concerning bibliographical essentials, relative uncommonness and commercial value of every included entry.

Further specific exclusions in a carefully worded title-page—are here recapitulated for emphasis and clarification:

1. From an avowed "bibliography of books" pamphlets might technically have been omitted in toto; that being manifestly undesirable, those containing as many as twenty-four pages are, by compromise, arbitrarily considered "books" and entered as such. Except for a few items of transcendent importance, tracts and brochures of fewer pages— along with circulars, broad-sheets and broad-sides—are excluded. The absence of such fragile and seldom-seen ephemera should not too often prove a source of disappointment to information-seekers.
2. A blanket exclusion applies to all books printed prior to 1650. In a work aimed at contributing the greatest good to the greatest number, space devoted to the dread complexities of De Bry, Hulsius and other contemporary annalists of that shadowy era of our remote antiquity, can be alloted more profitably to material on later periods, holding today far wider popular appeal. One is forced to recognize that present-day interest is—for some unknown reason—far more centered on comparatively recent exploits and events, within our interior valleys and along the shifting rim of a far-flung Western frontier, than it is, or ever will be, in activities—equally heroic and noteworthy —confined to the Atlantic seaboard, in a long-gone and forgotten yesterday.
3. Another blanket exclusion—of books relating to our insular possessions, including, of course, Hawaii—is mildly regrettable; but the inclusion of these subjects (and the voluminous maritime literature they involve) would mean a sacrifice of space unjustifiably disproportionate to the benefits afforded a comparatively small portion of our population.
4. No reasonable man, if such exists, can regret a further blanket exclusion: that of the innumerable "common" or "insignificant" books whose original editions command current prices of less than ten dollars each. Man's brief life permits all too little time for consequential books; why, then, waste it on trivia? No mature collector buys material in that category; and books unfit for purchase are surely unfit for admittance into a selective bibliography. An unweeded garden is close kin to a jungle! This work, then, is highly selective; aside from its rejection of common items, entirely too much so for that majestic coterie of the chosen few—the advanced collectors, specialty experts and hypercritical pedants—who, for the highly uncommon books in which alone they delight, demand a relatively unlimited inclusiveness. It should, however, prove sufficiently ample to meet, in some real measure, the needs of the less exacting group for which it is designed: that large group composed of the average collector, the average historical student, the average library-worker, the average antiquarian bookseller.