Houghton Library holds the largest collection anywhere of original works by the English author and artist Edward Lear (1812-1888). For the past two years the library has been engaged in a project to digitize all this material. The first phase of the endeavor included Lear’s natural history drawings, which were also the subject of an…
Chinua Achebe (1930-2013)
“I speak softly, but I carry a big stick” joked Chinua Achebe when he began his talk at the Christopher Okigbo International Conference at Harvard in 2007. Indeed he did. His debut novel Things Fall Apart, was “hard-hitting” in bringing home to Western readers the African perspective on the social and political consequences of colonial…
What’s New: The Machine that Needed an Artist
The Department of Printing and Graphic Arts recently acquired this hollow-cut silhouette in an oval shape of approximately 3½ x 5”. The inscription below the silhouette identifies the maker as “Williams,” referring to one of the few African-American silhouettists known of the nineteenth century, Moses Williams (1777-ca.1825). An inscription in the same hand on the…
What’s New: Poetry on the line
A story in this week’s Harvard Gazette covers a new exhibition at the Woodberry Poetry Room called PHONE-A-POEM: A Selection of Archival & Newly-Commissioned Answering Machine Poems. Started in 1976 by Cambridge poet Peter Payack, for 25 years Phone-a-Poem offered callers recorded poems from the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, or Donald Hall. Visitors…
Houghton Visiting Fellowship Recipients, 2013-14
Each year, Houghton awards visiting fellowships to support scholars whose research requires the use of Houghton collections. We are pleased to announce the awarding of 26 fellowships for the 2013-14 fiscal year:…
Auspicious Debuts: Birdwatching with a future president
Theodore Roosevelt is perhaps the most prolific American president, having published over forty books and numerous articles during his life. His very first publication was significantly less august than his later writings: a four-page pamphlet titled The Summer Birds of the Adirondacks in Franklin County, N.Y., co-written with his friend Hal Minot and published in…
What’s New: Videos Highlight Houghton Contributions to Library Lab
Library Lab, a Harvard grant program for funding innovative ideas in libraries, has posted videos about a number of recent projects to YouTube. Three of those projects involve contributions from Houghton staff members: Connecting the Dots is a pilot project using the new archival cataloging standard EAC-CPF to create records for the members of Samuel…
April lectures on scientific illustration, genuine and forged
On Wednesday April 10th, Nick Wilding, Assistant Professor in Early Modern History at Georgia State University, will give the 97th George Parker Winship Lecture. “Forging the Moon: or, How to Spot a Fake Galileo” will discuss a copy of Galileo’s landmark Sidereus Nuncius, claimed to hold Galileo’s hand-drawn images of the moon observed through a…
What’s New: A Digital Harmony
In 1626, Nicholas Ferrar and his extended family withdrew from London to the village of Little Gidding, where they lived in secluded religious devotion. As part of their practices, the women of the family created a harmony of the Gospels, literally cutting and pasting the four texts to produce a single narrative. King Charles I,…
You’ve Got Mail: Two Unpublished Letters by William Morris
Houghton Library recently acquired two autograph letters written by William Morris (1834-1896) the English designer, author, visionary socialist and proprietor of the Kelmscott Press. These letters are especially appealing because they are both hitherto unknown and unpublished, and addressed to an individual not known to have corresponded with Morris until these letters surfaced at auction…