Houghton’s newest exhibition, “London As It Is” opens tomorrow, and runs through April of next year. Highlighting the work of artist Thomas Shotter Boys and his book of the same name, the exhibition details each step of Boys’ artistic process, from original sketches to the finished, hand colored scenes of 19th century London….
Cutting remarks
Richard S. Field, Curator Emeritus of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, Yale University Art Gallery, will give this year’s Philip and Frances Hofer Lecture, on Thursday, December 3, 2009, 5:30 pm, in Houghton’s Edison and Newman Room. Entitled “Cutting Remarks: The Preparation of Woodcuts, 1400-1600”, the talk will discuss the history of the physical craft of…
Winward Prescott Bookplate Collection
[This post adapted from Kenneth Carpenter’s Reader’s Choice exhibition in the Houghton Library ] The largest component of Houghton Library’s notable bookplate collection was the gift of Winward Prescott, class of 1909. Prescott’s interest in bookplates was clearly lifelong, for as early as 1914 he published a bibliography of bookplate literature, which he revised and…
Picturing Prayer
Picturing Prayer: Books of Hours in Houghton Library, Harvard University is a new website devoted to examples of this prevalent form of the medieval book. The site examines the various parts of a typical book of hours, and provides ten examples from Houghton collections, digitized in high resolution from cover to cover, utilizing page-turning software….
Harry Elkins Widener remembered
Our newest online exhibition examines two crucial figures in the history of the Harvard College Library, Harry Elkins Widener, and his mother Eleanor, who gave Harvard both Harry’s outstanding collection of books and manuscripts, and the library that memorializes him….
Tennessee Williams Additional Papers
Cataloging has recently been completed on the Harvard Theatre Collection’s Tennessee Williams Additional Papers, 1946-1983, ( MS Thr 550.) Details can be found in the finding aid created by senior manuscripts cataloger Bonnie B. Salt. These papers join a wealth of Tennessee Williams material at the Houghton Library and the Harvard Theatre Collection, most notably…
The Hyde Collection, In Person and Online
In honor of Samuel Johnson’s 300th birthday, Houghton is presenting an exhibition of the Donald & Mary Hyde Collection of Dr. Samuel Johnson for the first time since its arrival at Houghton in 2004. The exhibition will be on display in Houghton’s Edison & Newman Room through November 14th, and is accompanied by an online…
MMajor MMilestone
Houghton’s Technical Services Department today announced that it had added its 2000th finding aid to the OASIS database, Harvard’s online catalog of archival and manuscript collections. The Mary M. Engel collection of “filleuls de guerre” letters is a collection of letters from World War I soldiers to their “godmother” and pen pal, Mary Engel. For…
Longfellow Exhibition Honored
“Public Poet, Private Man: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at 200” has won the 2009 Leab Award for Best Online Exhibition from the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries. All of us at Houghton extend our congratulations to the Modern Books and Manuscripts Department, guest exhibition curator Christoph Irmscher, and…
W.V. Quine Papers
Cataloging is now complete on our collection of the papers of the influential thinker and Harvard philosophy professor Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000). At over 80 boxes, there is a wealth of information on Quine’s life and work. I might stop by to have a look at Series IIE, “Crank letters sent to Quine” (his…