What do today's collectors and scholars know about the conditions that existed in a nineteenth-century commercial lithography shop? Most of what we do know comes from the prints themselves - places of publication, dates, names of publishers and artists/draftsmen appearing below the images. That information is supplemented by bare-bones information found in city directories and occasional advertisements for lithography firms and specific prints.

But there is one very important primary resource that Peter Marzio introduced to print scholars in his book, The Democratic Art (1979), namely the unpublished manuscript, Lithography: Its Theory and Practice by Charles Hart, which is held by the New York Public Library.

Hart worked in the commercial firm established by George Endicott in New York City for twenty years from 1839 to 1859. His manuscript provides personal accounts of many aspects of that firm's business, including observations about the lithographic process and commercial printers and artists who worked during this period and later.

Georgia Barnhill edited and annotated Hart's manuscript that the late Jay Last had had transcribed, and additionally, she has provided images of lithographic prints, copies of which are among the pages of Hart's manuscript.