A new book from J. Kevin Graffagnino, coming in February

The Vermont Historical Society has published a book on Vermontiana: Green Mountain Quartet: Essays on Antiquarian Vermontiana, edited by J. Kevin Graffagnino.

The history of collecting and writing about Vermont’s history and historic documents, often called Vermontiana, goes back almost two centuries, with historians such as VHS co-founder Henry Stevens, Sr. (1791-1867) assembling remarkable collections of Vermont books, newspapers, manuscripts, and ephemera for himself and VHS.

Others followed well into the 20th century, and Green Mountain Quartet explores the intertwined careers and writings of four antiquarian Vermontiana specialists: Harold Goddard Rugg (1883-1957), T. D. Seymour “Tom” Bassett (1913-2001), Marcus A. McCorison (1926-2013), and J. Kevin Graffagnino (1954).

In 2024, VHS published Ira Allen: A Biography, as well as another book that year, Vermontiana (published by UVM’s Center for Research on Vermont), which was a deep, annotated dive into collecting documents related to Vermont’s history. Green Mountain Quartet is something of a companion to it: it’s a collection of notable writings from these scholars about Vermont’s history that covers everything from essays about the Dresden Press (now on display at the Vermont History Museum in Montpelier), about the state’s early newspapers, folklore, politics, culture, and so forth, all accompanied by a number of images from VHS’s collection.

As a librarian at Dartmouth College for half a century, Rugg collected and wrote about Vermont history throughout his adult life and bequeathed 11,000 books and pamphlets, 3,600 broadsides, and more than 2,000 museum artifacts to VHS. Bassett was the leading Vermont historian of his generation and longtime curator of UVM’s Vermont collection. McCorison was the head of the American Antiquarian Society for 30 years and authored Vermont Imprints 1778-1820, which became a vital resource for students and collectors of early Vermont printing. Graffagnino worked at UVM, was the executive director of VHS, and is the author of numerous books and articles on Vermontiana. Collectively, these authors constitute a distinctive collector-curator-scholar chain.

Green Mountain Quartet features a selection of the principal Rugg-Bassett-McCorison-Graffagnino writings on Vermontiana, with an introductory essay on their lives and careers and filled with illustrations principally from the holdings of the VHS and UVM’s Silver Special Collections Library.

This hardcover edition will retail for $45 and will be a limited run of 500 signed and numbered copies. It will be available to purchase from the Vermont Historical Society bookstore, from Amazon.com, and various independent bookstores throughout the state in early February 2026. You can preorder your copy now, and we’ll ship it when it arrives.

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