Two recent articles in the Times Literary Supplement highlight the two Houghton journals, Harvard Review and Harvard Library Bulletin. A piece in the April 5th issue discusses Anne Fadiman’s essay in the current Harvard Review on the South Polar Times, a hand-illustrated magazine produced by Robert Scott’s Polar expeditions. For more information, see the full…
Cheerful Warblers: Songsters in the Harvard Theatre Collection
A new finding aid makes available for the first time over a thousand songsters in the Harvard Theatre Collection. These little books, cheaply produced and modestly priced, mixed traditional pieces of music with popular favorites in a handy pocket-sized format, throwing in recipes, magic tricks and jokes for good measure….
What’s New: In Search of Things Proust
This weekend, expect the smell of madeleines to fill the balmy spring air of Harvard Yard, as Proustians from around the world gather in Cambridge for the conference Proust and the Arts. Coinciding with the centennial of the publication of Swann’s Way, the first book in Proust’s masterwork In Search of Lost Time, the co-organizers…
You’ve Got Mail: “The Finest Collection of 19th Century Drawings in Private Hands”
Last month Houghton Library acquired a small group of letters and postcards from Charles Ricketts (1866-1931) & Charles Shannon (1863-1937) to the Irish artist and collector Cecil French (1879-1953). These letters were acquired with the Louis Appell Jr. Fund for British Civilization because they are full of current affairs, news and gossip in the world…
Tickets? Please!
From the perspective of today’s theatregoer, the current method of admission seems like a forgone conclusion: pay ahead of time for a ticket entitling you to a specific seat for a specific performance. But it wasn’t always this way, as evidenced by a wide range of ephemera in the Harvard Theatre Collection. Surveying even one…
New on OASIS in April
Finding aids for 11 newly cataloged collections have been added to the OASIS database this month, including a collection of photos of the dancer and choreographer known as La Meri. Processed by Michael W. Austin: Series X. James family photograph albums in the collection: Correspondence and Journals of Henry James Jr. (MS Am…
April Fun: Peirce’s Puzzler
Riddle: What does a semiotician do for fun? Answer: For your amusement this April Fools’ Day, we offer a rebus from the papers of American philosopher and scientist Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914). Peirce (pronounced like “purse”), a scholar of astonishingly wide-ranging interests, was best known in philosophy for his theory of “pragmatism,” but he made many…
Auspicious Debuts: “A captive, but a lion yet”
John Brown’s raid against the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, on October 16th, 1859, and his subsequent martyrdom elicited an immediate outpouring of abolitionist sentiment across the Northern states. In Columbus, Ohio, twenty-two-year-old William Dean Howells responded with “Old Brown,” his first separately printed work; the poem was soon reprinted in the Ashtabula Sentinel,…