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Background of Music Publishing in the United States Sheet music publishing was well established in the United States by the early 19th century. Much of the music was printed with engraved plates, although in the 1820s there was a fair amount of music published using the lithographic process. Lithography was not very common until the 1840's, when the development of chromolithography made illustrated title pages economically feasible. Engraved and lithographed music continued to be issued throughout the period of this project. It is interesting to note that many of the Confederate imprints in this collection were lithographed - a process that requires less equipment and materials. Metal was, of course, a commodity required for the war and would have been in very short supply for civilian use. A fine example of Confederate lithography is Edmond Newmann's Battery Wagner, lithographed by B. Duncan in Columbia, South Carolina in 1863 (left). The period after the Civil War saw a great increase in music publishing activity. The stereotype process allowed publishers to issue huge numbers of music for mass consumption. In his article, "Publishing and printing of music" in the New Grove Dictionary of American Music, D.W. Krummel suggests that this period could be called the "age of parlor music." Significant numbers of sheet music continued to be issued in the twentieth century, centering around the area of Manhattan known as "Tin pan alley." The sheer number of "hits" emanating from publishers such as Leo Feist, T.B. Harms, Irving Berlin, Shapiro & Bernstein, Von Tilzer and M. Witmark is remarkable. Sheet music became so popular that it was even issued as supplements to newspapers. With the rise of parlor music in the 1860's came a realization on the part of music publishers of the commercial value of printing advertising on the otherwise blank pages of music. Catalogs of songs and music were sometimes printed on earlier publications (see Schreiner's catalog in Battery schottisch), but by the end of the nineteenth century lists of songs with melodies (see The Old Man Ain't What He Used To Be) or entire pages reproduced for the user to "try over on your piano" became standard (see Over There). Companies even issued series of sheet music to help advertise their products, notably the Emerson Drug Company's promotion of Bromo-Seltzer. During World War I publishers even promoted the war effort by using the margins of the music for such slogans as "Food will win the war, don't waste it" (see The Dream of a Soldier Boy). Further resources about the history of sheet music publishing may be found in the bibliography. For the period covered by this project, a particularly good source is the article by D.W. Krummel, "Publishing and printing of music" in the New Grove Dictionary of American Music, Macmillan Press, 1986. Problems in Dating Publications Identifying the date of publication for music from this period is sometimes difficult. There has been considerable bibliographic interest in the printing and publishing of music in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but little bibliographic data is available about the publications from 1825 to the Civil War. Most of the items selected for this project bear some kind of copyright statement but these statements are not universal in the publications of the period before the enactment of the first U.S. copyright law in 1871. Moreover, because the music was engraved on plates, the publishers kept the plates in storage for long periods of time and printed new copies as they ran out of stock. Additionally, they would sell plates to other publishers who didn't necessarily bother to change the copyright information on the plates. The plate number can sometimes be used to identify the approximate date of publication but that depends on how much is known about the work of particular engravers or publishers. In this edition of the Southern Wagon, engraved by Mme. Wehrmann (New Orleans) and published by Joseph Bloch in Mobile, there is a deposit date of 1862. By noting that this set of