In the autumn of 1818, 23-year-old John Keats confessed in a letter to his brother George a fascination for one of his neighbors: “Mrs Brawne…still resides in Hampstead…her daughter senior is I think beautiful and elegant, graceful, silly, fashionable and strange we have a little tiff now and then.” The woman who caught Keats’s attention…
Pot o’ Pudding
This image comes from a collection of souvenir programs from the Hasty Pudding Theatricals. The Hasty Pudding Club was formed in 1795 when twenty-one Harvard students crowded into a dorm room to celebrate the establishment of a new on-campus society. Along with their goals of cultivating friendship and patriotism a special mandate was made that…
You’ve Got Mail: A Melville note resurfaces
Like an item consigned to the Dead Letter Office where Bartleby the Scrivener once worked, this brief note from Herman Melville lay undelivered to scholars and editors for nearly a century until the autograph collection of which it is a part received a full electronic finding aid in 2007. The note, perhaps clipped from a…
Ultra-effective for street ballyhoo purposes!
As cataloging of the Fredric Woodbridge Wilson Collection of Theater, Dance and Music (Harvard Theatre Collection) progresses, the treasures it contains are ever more in evidence. A recent standout is a group of fifteen cinema pressbooks for films from the 1930s, from studios including Warner Bros., Columbia, and RKO. Pressbooks, or campaign books, were a…
You’ve Got Mail: “I learn this from the knowledge of the laws of nature”
René Descartes (1596-1650) and Marin Mersenne (1588-1648), two of the greatest 17th century French minds, carried on a regular correspondence. In this lengthy 1640 letter to Mersenne, Descartes ranges widely, discussing a dispute with Pierre Bourdin, a Jesuit who had advanced a number of objections to Descartes’ Meditationes de Prima Philosophia, then circulating in manuscript…
New on OASIS in February
Finding aids for 16 newly cataloged collections have been added to the OASIS database this month, including buttons, seals, and other theatrical realia, as well as trade cards, portraits and more….
You’ve Got Mail: A Curious Discovery in Electricity
The curious discovery was related by Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) to Jan Ingenhousz (1730-1799) in this week’s letter, which is from Houghton’s Autograph File. Ingenhousz was physician to the court of Austria at the time, and a fellow of the Royal Society who later settled in England. Franklin was in London for his extended second trip…
Want to wash away your sins???
These “heavenly scented” towelettes are just one example of recently cataloged objects found in the Fredric Woodbridge Wilson Collection of Theater, Dance, and Music in the Harvard Theatre Collection. In addition to hot pepper candy and a rubber pencil other examples include…
Let’s Go to the Hop
[Thanks to Ward Project Music Cataloger Andrea Cawelti for contributing this post] You know your Friday afternoon is looking up when you open a 19th century dance treatise and stumble across the phrase “first, give all the ladies a vegetable….” An early donation by the late John Milton Ward, Charles Périn’s wonderful guide to the…
You’ve Got Mail: Compliments to Dr. Cohen
A curiosity in life, Chang Bunker (1811-1874) and Eng Bunker (1811-1874), the famous conjoined twins, leave us with this most curious thank you note. The experience of cataloging this letter led to some interesting observations. Chang and Eng spent every moment of their lives together but there is some evidence that they did try to…