The Harvard Theatre Collection recently purchased an interesting collection of manuscript 18th century opera arias at Sotheby’s. Owned by the Ducs de Luynes, and kept in their ancestral Château de Dampierre, some of these arias may have been in the D’Albert family since before the French Revolution. An intriguing provenance indeed, which raises many questions:…
Auspicious Debuts: Our Town
Just over seventy-five years ago, Our Town opened at Boston’s Wilbur Theatre, two weeks ahead of its scheduled Broadway premiere. That same day, January 25th 1938, The Boston Post carried a headline linking the new show to a suicide. Rosamond Pinchot, the glamorous starlet once billed as the loveliest woman in America, had taken her own…
You’ve Got Mail: Theodore Roosevelt as comic artist
Despite the many demands of being president, Theodore Roosevelt found time to regularly write to each of his six children while they were away at school or visiting friends. Tailored to match each child’s interests and personality, TR’s letters are filled with descriptions of family pets, siblings’ antics, and his own many adventures (which make…
A Revolutionary discovery in the stacks
Update: These documents have now been fully digitized, and are available here. Although the overwhelming majority of Houghton’s collections are well-cataloged, a few things that slipped through the cracks in the conversion from the card catalog to an online catalog still lurk on our shelves. Karen Nipps, Head of the Rare Book Cataloging Team, recently…
What’s New: A Collection of Bookbindings
For over 20 years, the bookseller David Block and his wife Shiu-min Block assembled a personal collection of bookbindings produced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their choice was guided by the condition of the books and the range of bindings they wished to include in their collection. In 2008, the David and Shiu-min Block…
New on OASIS in July
Finding aids for nine newly cataloged collections, and preliminary box lists for four recent acquisitions, have been added to the OASIS database this month, including programs of the Ballets Russes and playbills from Boston theaters. Processed by Irina Klyagin: Ballets Russes Programs, 1907-1929 (MS Thr 965) IUrii Nikiforovich Danilov Papers, 1920-1980 (MS Russ 125) …