The Boston historian, bookseller, and printer Samuel Gardner Drake opened the first antiquarian bookstore in America in 1830. He collected a vast range of mostly American historical and literary texts, which he subsequently used to write his authoritative studies of American Indians as well as his New England histories and genealogies. He also reprinted many Colonial-era works and in the course of nearly five decades as a bookseller helped build the libraries of such collectors as Henry Stevens and George Brinley Jr.

Drake was born in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, on 11 October 1798, the third of five children of Simeon Drake, a farmer, and Love Muchmore Tucke Drake. The Drake's could trace their ancestry to Robert Drake, who immigrated to Exeter, New Hampshire, from Essex, England, around 1640; the family's history would become the subject of one of Samuel Gardner Drake's books, and genealogy in general would be one of his lifelong...