Having recently taken a course on the history of binding at Rare Book School, I’m more aware than ever of the splendid bindings sitting on our shelves unnoticed. The binding of a book or score is not always indicated in its catalog record, depending on when the item was cataloged, so I recently stumbled completely…
Box its ears and send it home
If this book should chance to roam/ Box its ears and send it home That bit of doggerel has been inscribed on books for many years in the hopes that if lost, they would be returned to the rightful owner. It came to mind when the story of a book roaming from our collections was…
Double vision?
I’m currently cataloging a nice run of English opera imprints from the 18th century, many published by John Walsh. This particular score, William Boyce’s The Chaplet, seemed to be another in much the same vein. These Walsh scores are engraved, and provide a wide variety of printing variations, both expected, and … unexpected. Now granted,…
What’s New: Acquisitions from the Collection of Charlotte and Arthur Vershbow
In the second half of the twentieth century Charlotte and Arthur Vershbow of Boston formed a notable private rare book collection. They were close friends of Philip Hofer, founding curator of Houghton Library’s Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, and their collecting was deeply influenced by Hofer’s collection and attitude toward collecting. After the deaths…
New on OASIS in August
Finding aids for six newly cataloged collections, and preliminary box lists for two recent acquisitions, have been added to the OASIS database this month, including documents concerning Thomas Carlyle’s bequest of his library to Harvard….
What’s New: Italian opera seria manuscripts from the library of the Ducs de Luynes
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…