“I am having a great time down hear in the city” -Joe Last week’s Superstorm Sandy has the New York metropolitan region on the minds and in the hearts of many these days. Thus, a little trip down memory lane to times that – at least on the surface – appeared rosier. Houghton has in…
Collecting the Counterculture
On Wednesday, November 14th, at 5.30 P.M., Houghton will host a mind-altering experience: Carl Williams, head of the Counterculture Department at the venerable firm of Maggs Bros in London (By appointment, purveyors of rare books and manuscripts to Her Majesty the Queen) will talk on a topic the Queen doesn’t collect: the Counterculture. The term…
New on OASIS in November
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 sheet music relating to animals, caricatures of Gilbert & Sullivan, and William Dean Howells memorabilia. Processed by Irina Klyagin with the assistance of Andrea Cawelti: Pauline Viardot-Garcia…
You’ve Got Mail: “It takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose”
The process of campaigning for the position of U.S. president can be an arduous one. For Theodore Roosevelt, the 1912 presidential campaign very nearly turned deadly. TR had already served two presidential terms, from 1901-1908. Despite claiming he would never again seek that office, TR was not terribly eager to retire from public life. His…
What Would Thomas Hollis Do?
The Liberty Fund is following a plan first devised by Thomas Hollis over 200 years ago and making available “once again a selection of titles originally distributed to the colonies by one of the most remarkable philanthropists and supporters of American independence, the eighteenth-century Englishman Thomas Hollis.” Hollis (1720-1774) distributed books and pamphlets, to Harvard…
Visualizing Edward Lear
[Thanks to Matthew Battles, Senior Researcher at metaLAB, for contributing this post on the new Edward Lear Visualizer.] I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but let me just get this out: a library is no mere set of bookshelves, no simple windowpane through which to view the wonders of books and the discoveries…
You’ve Got Mail: Princesses Say the Darnedest Things
In this week’s mail bag, a touch of levity and an epic scandal. A letter to American raconteur Alexander Woollcott from British author Marie Belloc Lowndes dated April 28, 1937, begins, “Dearest Alec, Here are two little news stories of those royal children.” I wish I’d come across this letter back in June during the…
W.H. Ireland’s Original Shakespeare Forgeries Identified
As the Curator of the Hyde Collection, I’m very pleased that the distinguished antiquarian bookseller Arthur Freeman has shared with us an exciting discovery about the significance of an item in the collection. The Shakespeare forgeries of William Henry Ireland have long intrigued scholars and captured the public imagination. But Ireland’s practice later in life…
You’ve Got Mail: “A sort of crisis came in my life”
Harriet Beecher Stowe was paid $300 for 40 installments of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly by the Free Soil newspaper National Era, which began running them in June 1851. Encouraged by their success, Stowe decided to publish them as a novel, and the first edition, published by the Boston firm of John…
Lions, and Tigers, and Bears? Oh my!
“If you go down in the woods today you better not go alone It’s lovely down in the woods today but safer to stay at home” Don’t blame composer John Walter Bratton if your children are scared by these song lyrics. Composed in 1907, Bratton’s The Teddy Bears Picnic did not actually contain any…