[Thanks to Caroline Duroselle-Melish, Assistant Curator of Printing and Graphic Arts, for contributing this post.] The series of prints, entitled “Salus generis humani”, that are bound in this volume were made in the 1590s by the engraver Aegidius Sadeler II (1570-1629). They were engraved after the work of the Mannerist painter Johan von Achen (1552-1615)…
A Surgeon’s Predictions
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. A surprising discovery when opening up the book Predicting the Future: An Illustrated History and Guide to the Techniques is who the author is. Although not a particularly famous person, Albert, S. Lyons is a surgeon. His…
Benois’ Russian Alphabet
If you watched the opening ceremony of the Winter Games, then you recall being given a sweeping lesson in Russian culture brought to you by letters from the Cyrillic alphabet. The pageant’s producer, Konstantin Ernst, made no secret of his inspiration: at the start of the program opened next to a dreaming girl named Lubov…
La Danse Macabre
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo collection. Eros, it should now be obvious, is intrinsic to the Santo Domingo Collection; it follows that Thanatos can’t be far behind. This lavish volume by Éditions Kra is entitled La Danse Macabre, and consists of twenty images by…
DIY Devil
Franz Lehár’s operetta Die lustige Witwe opened at the Theater an der Wien on December 30th, 1905, and stayed open. The show was so immediately and immensely popular that instead of concluding at the end of the season for the customary summer hiatus, it simply kept running: by April 1907 it had been performed 400…
Not suitable for snuggling
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. These oddities, from fancy drawn, May surely raise the question, Will DARWIN say- by Chance they’re formed, Or ‘Natural Selection?’ Edward William Cooke originally published Grotesque Animals : invented, drawn, and described in 1872, this version…
New on OASIS in February
Finding aids for nine newly cataloged collections have been added to the OASIS database this month, including a collection of letters by Johann Strauss, scrapbooks from the Theodore Roosevelt collection, and decorative tiles depicting scenes from Shakespeare….
The adventures of I-Am-The-Man
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo collection. Today’s feature is Etidorhpa, or The end of the earth, a fantastical novel by pharmacologist John Uri Lloyd, written in the hollow-earth mold of Jules Verne’s Journey to the center of the earth. The title is, as observant…