William Smith Livingston [Bookplate]

Most of the approximately 300 items in the Maverick Family Collection come from the New York City and Newark workshops of Peter Maverick (1780-1831) and document his skill and technique in engraving on copper or steel. Several are the work of other hands in whole or in part: Maverick’s father Peter Rushton Maverick, his brother Samuel, his daughters Emily and Maria Ann and other family members are all represented.

Formats in the collection include bank notes, book illustrations, bookplates, diplomas and certificates, maps, portraits, trade cards and original drawings. Annexed to these are archival materials, correspondence, publicity materials, research notes and reproductions of Maverick works not held by NPL.

The indispensable guide to the collection’s contents and arrangement is the checklist of engravings and lithographs in Stephen DeWitt Stephens, The Mavericks, American engravers (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1950) 89-180, as supplemented and corrected by the same author’s Documentation corrections & additions to The Mavericks, American engravers (The author, 1964). A copy of The Mavericks is filed in Box 2, folder 22, and should be consulted for more detailed descriptions of the contents of the collection. A photocopy of the supplementary volume is filed in Box 2, folder 23, from an original (one of 50 copies printed) in the Library’s R. C. Jenkinson Collection of Finely Printed Books.

Stephens organized his Maverick inventory by known or suspected creator from oldest to youngest. He arranged the products of the major creators by format, and within each format alphabetically by subject. The checklist is numbered consecutively, leaving unassigned numbers at the end of each section to facilitate admission of new discoveries.

The copy of Stephens’s volume The Mavericks stored with the collection is replete with marginal annotations in pencil. Some of these notes refer to engravings omitted from the printed list; these are given numbers (e.g. “S1460” or “S1468-A”) that attempt to preserve Stephens’s original scheme.

Using Stephens’s ordering of the material, the works of each creator have been processed as a separate series. Each work in the collection is identified by its Stephens number (e.g. S211) from the 1950 checklist or its 1964 supplement. If a work appears on neither printed list, a Stephens number is assigned and given in quotation marks (e.g. “S725-X”).

NPL holds Maverick engravings outside the main collection (principally in its rare book and bookplate collections) which have nonetheless been listed in the inventory according to their Stephens numbers. One item (S774b) found in Fine prints “M-small” was moved to the Maverick Family collection in the course of processing.

Archival materials, research notes, reproductions of Maverick engravings and other secondary materials have been gathered in four supplementary series filed after the main collection.