Shortly after March 12, 1872, the architect Henry Hobson Richardson (1838-1886) received a letter, signed by George Minot Dexter and Charles Henry Parker on behalf of the Building Committee, inviting him to enter a competition to design a new church building for Trinity Church in Boston. Though terse and factual in formulation, the letter led…
Wild Egon Wilden
Dedicated collectors gather materials in many different ways: they may buy a single specific work; they may acquire a “box of stuff” which they know includes one or more items they want as well as other materials which don’t interest them. Occasionally they even buy unseen an entire collection from someone who was known to…
You’ve Got Mail: Deciphering Shakespeare
The Shakespeare authorship question, now over 160 years old, continues to generate books, conferences, lectures, debates, films, websites, and even blog posts; a lot of people continue to doubt that William Shakespeare the actor actually wrote the plays attributed to him. The controversy itself has become a worthy subject of study, interesting for its longevity,…
Country dancing, Peninsular Wars-style
Today, Houghton Library observes the anniversary of John Milton Ward’s passing. Ward, a Harvard musicologist who turned to extensive collecting in his retirement, donated a “Magnificent Collection” of performing arts material to us over the course of many years before his death in 2011. One of his favorite areas of study was the world of…
You’ve got mail: There’s no business like music business
John M. Ward, recently deceased William Powell Mason Professor of Music emeritus at Harvard University, was fascinated by the business side of music, particularly the relationship between composers and publishers. In the course of pursuing this fascination, he had the opportunity to purchase a large collection of business-related correspondence assembled by Albi Rosenthal, English antiquarian…
New on OASIS in December
Finding aids for 8 newly cataloged collections, and a preliminary box list for one recent acquisition, have been added to the OASIS database this month, including Aubrey Beardsley illustrations, a major addition to our Johnny Green collection, and letters of Edwin Booth. Processed by Michael W. Austin: Johnny Green Additional Papers, 1880-1989 (MS…
You’ve Got Mail: A Paper Courtship
In a noticeably hurried hand, George Bernard Shaw dashed off a letter to famed actress Ellen Terry. He was sending along the last proofs of his play Mrs. Warren’s Profession for her opinion. “The post is just going,” he wrote, “and there is no further communication with this place for 48 hours.” Having had time…
Yodel-le-hi-hoo
When you think of Austrian folksongs, perhaps like me you think of Edelweis, or lovely sweet Ländler tunes in the same style? Recently while cataloging a bound volume of Austrian dance music (I thought) from the Congress of Vienna, I ran across this imprint of three Beliebte tyroler Lieder. When I saw the first page…
You’ve Got Mail: “My ideal of an Arctic explorer”
Removed from Houghton’s copy of Sir William Edward Parry’s Journal of a Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific Performed in the Years 1819-20 is a clutch of letters and other papers tracing differing methods of polar exploration in the nineteenth century. First, a note from Sir George…
Valerie Fletcher Eliot (1926-2012)
The passing of Valerie Eliot last Friday evoked sadness for the loss of a good friend to the Houghton Library, and marked the breaking of our the last living link with the life and legacy of T.S. Eliot, a poet inextricably linked to Harvard University. Mrs. Eliot’s dedication to protecting and promoting Eliot’s literary legacy…