This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. For the Scientific Treatment and Cure of the Alcohol, Morphine, Opium, Chloral, and Cocaine Habits! Designed especially for the treatment of drug and alcohol abuse this pamphlet advertises the virtues of Dr. Rose’s Sanitarium. Located in bucolic Connecticut…
Ba(rnum) humbug
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Newly represented among the authors in the Santo Domingo Collection is the showman and author P.T. Barnum. Shown here is an 1866 copy of Barnum’s survey/memoir The humbugs of the world, translated into French as Les blagues de…
Where’s Waldo?
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) and Daniel Chester French, (1850-1931) Ralph Waldo Emerson sits silently as a dark bronze statue, watching young Harvard scholars travel in and out of their classrooms. He sits majestically as a marble sculpture, overseeing readers at the Concord Free Public Library. He sits coyly as a forest sprite, in a corner…
The Enduring Classical Tradition I
This is the first of a series of posts about recent acquisitions by the Department of Early Books and Manuscripts in Houghton Library of classical material which reflect the continuing use of material that falls inside and outside the Department’s traditional chronological division (material before 1600) of the Library’s curatorial departments. The first is Jacques Charpentier…
The Oldest Student in France and the Champion of the World
The Department of Modern Books and Manuscripts has recently acquired a set of 29 business cards produced between the late 1800s and the 1930s in France (FC9.D4751.Q890c). A good deal of information was packed onto these small, square pieces of paperboard as the people for whom they were made did not shy away from vaunting…
When a Tums simply won’t do
Oils of rosemary, lavender, thyme, marjoram, hyssop, rue, oranges, lemons …. Wait a minute, what is this doing in my ca. 1660 manuscript of country dance steps? Paper was scarce, and I frequently discover odd things written into the margins of early printed and manuscript books and scores. People doodled, tested their quills, and jotted…
What’s for dinner?
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Feeling a bit peckish? Why not try a delicious dish featuring Boletus edulis, which are fleshy mushroom-like fungi which have tubes in place of gills. They are often characterized as being “spongy underneath.” To make one version…
A sumptuous edition of Pierre Louÿs’s unpublished poems
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. A particularly sumptuous volume from the collection of Gérard Nordmann is today’s Santo Domingo Collection feature. This 1938 publication of Poèmes inédits (Unpublished poems) by Pierre Louÿs was limited to 109 numbered copies; this is copy 5. Louÿs…
Death caps
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Once you have made the fateful choice to eat a Death cap it starts out slowly, there is no discomfort for the first twelve hours then you have abdominal pain with vomiting, diarrhea, and an extreme thirst. After…
New on OASIS in November
Finding aids for eleven newly cataloged collections, and preliminary box lists for two recent acquisitions, have been added to the OASIS database this month, including a collection of rare early jigsaw puzzles, theatrical costume and set designs, and the papers of reporter Nicholas Daniloff….