In September, 1662, the Elector of Bavaria and his wife celebrated the christening of their infant son with eight days of public and private festivity. The squares and streets of Munich were lit up, gold coins and commemorative medals struck and bread and wine freely distributed to the populace. Meanwhile, a trilogy of interwoven operas…
Witches and vampires and ghosts, Oh My!
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Witches have always fascinated people, from the magical tales of Merlin to the Salem Witch trials, to the current trend of magic and vampires in popular culture. Written by Colin Wilson and illustrated by Una Woodruff, Witches is…
You’ve Got Mail: “A Fine Achievement”
Last month Houghton Library acquired two evocative letters from major figures in the English private press movement of the early twentieth century. Houghton has an outstanding collection of the books from all of the Presses and these letters document the close personal relationship between the major figures involved. In the first letter, dated 16 December…
SHIFTING BRILLIANCIES: Digitizing Harvard’s Heaney Recordings
“You can go backwards as well as forwards.” –Seamus Heaney When I first began the task of creating metadata for our recently-digitized Seamus Heaney recordings (part of the Woodberry Poetry Room’s initiative to digitize its entire collection of rare and at-risk Heaney cassettes), I anticipated a fairly straightforward trajectory. I’d sit down, don the headphones,…
“A Book Notable for its Breadth of Knowledge and its Stunning Presentation”
The Houghton Library Studies series was established to provide a forum for the scholarly analysis of the wide-ranging materials in the collections of Houghton Library. The fourth and latest volume in the series is Castle McLaughlin’s A Lakota War Book from Little Bighorn: The Pictographic “Autobiography of Half Moon” which appeared in 2013. While earlier volumes…
Superb specimens
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo collection. Herbarium for pharmaceutical students was produced by Alban Edward Lomax, a 19th-century pharmacist that hailed from Liverpool, England. An herbarium is essentially a collection of preserved plant specimens typically arranged by a specific nomenclature and classification. …
A quaint and curious volume of not-so-forgotton lore
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. This 1882 volume of Poe’s poetry and essays, accompanied by biographical information and commentary on the poems, is a fine example of the publishers’ cloth bindings of its period. In response to broadening literacy and therefore increasing demand,…
“Who’s Afraid of Recording?”
Theatregoers in Shakespeare’s day would say they went to hear a play; they wouldn’t say they had seen one. The recent release by Masterworks Broadway of the original-cast album of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” gives us good reason to sound like Elizabethans and forego seeing this classic piece of American drama for the pleasure…
You’ve Got Mail: “What About Webb’s Beasts”
A recent issue of the United Kingdom’s National Trust Arts, Buildings, Collections Bulletin (Winter 2013-2014) includes a report by Jane Gallagher, Senior Curator for the Midlands, that describes an important acquisition by the Trust and a summer loan from the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and draws on a Houghton Library collection to connect the…
A Practice in Torture
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Sometimes you come across something so gruesome that even though you want to look away, you can’t. Le Musée des Supplices certainly fits that description. A book that gives the history of torture written by Roland Villeneuve, a…