Home Awards The Fossil History Collections Contact Links Amateur Journals at the Library of Congress

The Library of Congress has at least two collections of amateur journals.

Rare Books Stacks

Some of the contents can be referenced from the LC Online Catalog. Select "Browse", then use the drop-down arrow to select "CALL NUMBER (LC Class. No)" and type "AP2.A12" in the search box. After pressing the "Search" button, you will see several screens of listings.

The amateur journalism boxes held in the Rare Book stacks are tricky to retrieve, so advance notice is required if you want to examine them in person.

These four boxes do not have many papers published before 1901, so there are likely additional holdings of early amateur papers elsewhere in the Library.

Also available in the stacks are bound volumes of The Fossil (1909-1965) and The National Amateur.

"X" Collections

The Internet Archive, which has linked to images from the X Collections, includes the following 31 entries related to amateur journalism. The bulk of the papers are from the 1930s through the 1950s, with a number of earlier dates reaching into the nineteenth century and a few from the early 1960s. The Internet Archive provides an image of the first page of each item in a collection...a total of 7,778 images of 6,804 items (307 of of these are duplicates) in the 31 collections. For small items, multiple images appear on a single page.

Most collections are primarily of journals whose titles begin with the same letter, although all collections have at least a few other titles mixed in. Within a collection, the journals generally run from oldest to newest. For each year, the smaller page sized journals generally appear before the larger.

In collection 1305, the first 46 items have Library of Congress classification X-PN 4826 and include: NAPA items from 1944-1955; UAPAA items from 1941-45; and journals announcing reorganization of UAPA in 1940s. All other items in these collections have classification X-PN 4827.

If you want to access any X collection in person at the Library of Congress, be sure to make arrangements beforehand. They are stored off-site and can require more than a week to be brought to the Library.