Philip Hofer (1898-1984), founding Curator of the Department of Printing & Graphic Arts in Houghton Library, was in Oxford in June 1962 to deliver his six Lyell lectures on “The Artist and the Book in France.” He and Mrs. Hofer used this occasion to visit a number of friends and colleagues in England. On Sunday…
You’ve Got Mail: “Of what athority E. esteems this mutalated gospel?”
Theological disagreements between family members are not a new phenomenon, as evidenced in this week’s letter. Few families, however, contain one of the most prominent religious and philosophical thinkers of the last two centuries, a student of the founder of “higher criticism” and a self-taught woman who defied rigid theological and societal definition. Mary Moody…
Two Presidents battle for history
This Friday, Christie’s auction house in New York is selling a blockbuster item–George Washington’s annotated copy of the Constitution. Houghton holds a book from Washington’s library that, while not so iconic a work, gives quite a bit more insight into Washington’s actions as President….
You’ve Got Mail: Send some mail of your own!
“You’ve Got Mail”… Isn’t that such a nice thing to hear and doesn’t it feel good when friends and family take the time to reach out to you with a good old-fashioned notecard? Please take a moment to stop by the lobby at Houghton Library where you will find a collection of notecards for sale…
The Grand Æra of Bibliomania: the Roxburghe Sale of 1812
2012 is the 200th anniversary of the event that could be said to mark the start of the modern era of book collecting: the sale of the library of John Ker, 3rd Duke of Roxburghe. The sale of this extensive and masterfully assembled collection attracted the interest of every major book collector in Britain, its…
Raise your glass to Champagne Charlie!
Who is Charlie?? He drinks all day, gets into trouble with his friends at night, and won’t settle down with one woman because he’s addicted to champagne! Champagne Charlie was composed by Alfred Lee in the 19th-century British music hall scene. Music hall involved a mixture of popular songs, comedy, speciality acts, and variety entertainment. …
You’ve Got Mail: Some Beautiful Observations of the Georgium Sidus
The excitement of this week’s transit of Venus was somewhat dampened in Boston by cloudy skies and rain. To make up for this, we offer a bit of astronomical history from the time of the first widely viewed transits of Venus in the 18th century. Though we’ll never see it transiting the sun, William Herschel’s…
Prototyping the future of archival processing
This spring, twelve students in Professor Stuart Shieber’s Harvard University class, Engineering Sciences and Computer Sciences 96, were assigned the problem of examining the Harvard library special collections with the hope of helping to eliminate the problem of backlogged materials unavailable to researchers. Houghton Library and Schelsinger Library worked with the students and the results…
New on OASIS in June
Finding aids for eight newly cataloged collections, and preliminary box lists for two recent acquisitions, have been added to the OASIS database this month, most significantly the papers of ballet dancer, actress, choreographer and opera director Vera Zorina…
You’ve Got Mail: “The Dr. was in high glee at Auchinleck”
The Hyde Collection of Samuel Johnson holds some 75 letters written by James Boswell, but this just-acquired, previously unpublished letter to Boswell’s brother David perhaps outshines them all. When he wrote to David, then living in Valencia, Spain, in November of 1776, it was his first letter in several years. To one who has such…