The Mercantile Library Visitors' Register, 1872-1918 is Online

Excuse me while I geek out. The Mercantile Library’s Visitor Register is now available online, thanks to the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County (PLCH) as part of a preservation project funded in part through a Library Services and Technologies Act Preservation Grant through the State Library of Ohio.

Our Visitor’s Register is a historical document like no other, containing the signatures of visitors to the library between 1872 and 1918. It records the date of their visit, where they come from, and by whom they were introduced to the Mercantile Library.

As historian Robert Vitz writes in At the Center, 175 Years at Cincinnati’s Mercantile Library, “Like most institutions, the Mercantile Library required strangers to register. Only one such register survives from the nineteenth century.” This utterly unique document and artifact contains the signatures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, sculptor Edmonia Lewis, Arthur Sullivan of Gilbert & Sullivan, John Uri Lloyd, and thousands of other citizens. Many have come to Cincinnati from distant corners of the Republic and the globe. Their handwriting makes their presence here felt, and the fact that so many travelers signed this register, Vitz told me over lunch the other day, “shows just how important a place the Mercantile Library held in this city.”

The register has been carefully digitized by the Public Library of Cincinnati’s Digital Services, which is part of their excellent Local History and Genealogy department, and hosted on their website. There’s much work to be done. Ohio Book Store will now continue to painstakingly deacidify, repair, and rebind these pages so that they will be available for viewing at the Mercantile. The scans, available through the link below, have yet to be transcribed and indexed so that they will be fully searchable. But these images, illustrating an intricate, human and geographic web of connections, are beautiful.

Click here to view the register in PLCH’s Digital Collections.

Happy arm-chair time-traveling.

-Cedric Rose