Year: 2012

Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), best known for his novels Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, spent the final four years of his life on his estate near the village of Vailima in Samoa. Over the course of these years, he wrote 45 letters to his dear friend…

Sherlockians have long recognized the wisdom and practical utility of the “Sacred Writings,” the four novels and fifty-six stories that comprise the Sherlock Holmes canon. This letter from Baker Street Irregulars founder Christopher Morley (1890-1957) to Edgar W. Smith (1894-1960), a vice-president of the General Motors Export Company and prominent Baker Street Irregular, illustrates a…

Grief overcame members of the Twenty-eighth Congregational Society of Boston as Deacon Samuel Joseph May read aloud a letter from their ailing minister, the Unitarian abolitionist Theodore Parker: “I shall not speak to you to-day; for this morning, a little after four o’clock, I had a slight attack of bleeding in the lungs or throat.”…

Finding aids for 11 newly cataloged collections have been added to the OASIS database this month, including photos of burlesque performers and the papers of Richard Brinsley Sheridan….

More recently digitized items at Houghton include “whimsical exuberances too tedious to mention” (…like the satirical broadside from which that line comes…), stunningly colored Dürer woodcuts, letters and postcards from Marina Tsvetaeva, a letter from Rembrant, the Olney hymns manuscript,  an 18th century Italian work on fortifications with illustrations by Prince Raimondo di Sangro Sansevero,…

Not surprisingly given his monumental achievements in the opera world, Richard Wagner was a bit of a control freak. We have ample evidence in his correspondence and even in the operas themselves, of back-room negotiation, power plays, and even the occasional blackmail of one kind or another. The complex performance and publication history of Tannhäuser…

The already immortal English contralto Kathleen Ferrier (1912-1953) has just been further immortalized in a postage stamp from the British Royal Mail in its “Britons of Distinction” series. Other Britons in the series include Frederick Delius, Thomas Newcomen and Joan Mary Fry. The image used, this gorgeous shot of Ferrier as Orfeo in Gluck’s 1762…

An exciting array of materials have recently been digitized at Houghton. They include manuscript material from Joanna Baillie, George Eliot, John Keats, Charles Lamb, Percy Shelley, Robert Southey, Alfred Tennyson, Hester Thrale and George Washington. A 15th century breviary and Belgian incunable, multiple musical scores, cartoons, broadsides and more may also be viewed fully online….

One thinks of Houghton Library as a repository of the very old and the very special but it is also — in its association with Harvard Review — a publisher of the very new. For more than a decade, Houghton has been the home of Harvard’s only professional literary journal, publishing the likes of Seamus…