This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. In honor of Halloween I thought we share some creepy images that we found recently in a copy of Vu, a French periodical that covers a range of topics concerning France in the early 20th-century. As the cover attests…
Of Rampant Bulls and Scales
As part of a continuing series of lectures and workshops sponsored by Houghton Library and the Standing Committee on Medieval Studies, Dr. Peter Rückert of the Landesarchiv of Baden-Württemberg in Stuttgart visited Harvard the week of October 13th. On Tuesday, October 14th Dr. Rückert presented an illustrated lecture at Houghton entitled “Paper History and Watermarks…
Demons and devils
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Though outnumbered by books on drugs and sexuality, the Santo Domingo Collection’s occult works are nonetheless considerable in number. Featured today are two early works on demonology, one by a French political philosopher and statesman, and the other by…
Poems on their birthdays
This weekend involves at least two major 100th birthday parties: the first, on Saturday, is for the poet John Berryman, born on 25 October 1914. Celebrations will extend into Monday, appropriately, for Dylan Thomas, born on 27 October 1914. Thomas and Berryman have unfortunately legendary personae (either could have been responsible for drinking 18 straight…
Happy Birthday, Emily Dickinson Archive!
Launched on October 23, 2013, the Emily Dickinson Archive (EDA) celebrates its first year of operation this week, during Open Access Week. The site received 1.2 million “hits” from poetry lovers in its first 10 days; after a year, monthly usage averages 10,000 visits and 377,000 page views per month. About 80% of visitors are…
Mob Stories
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Detailing the early 1970s mob scene Mafia at War is an interesting and thorough read. Published by New York Magazine, this book gives an in depth chronology of the mob bosses from the early 1900s to the early…
A poet, killer, thief, brawler, and vagabond…
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Francois Villon was all of those things, and most prominently a subversive outsider. At a time when most poetic works were strongly religious or allegorical Villon wrote with honesty about love and sex, drinking, money problems, and…
D.H. Lawrence on strike
The Modern Books and Manuscripts department recently acquired the manuscript of D.H. Lawrence’s short story “Her Turn.” Ten onionskin pages depict a battle of wills between a husband and wife fighting over shares of the husband’s strike pay. The story was timely – Lawrence composed it over a three-day period in March 1912, during a…
Art and the Occult
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. James Wasserman, author, editor, publisher and occultist, gives us Art and Symbols of the Occult. A disciple of Aleister Crawley’s Ordo Templi Orientis, he has written numerous books on the subject as well as republishing and updating several…
Creepy-crawlies and their tell-tale traces
Unsurprisingly, some of the centuries-old books now in Houghton’s library stacks have fared better over time than others. There are many factors that impact the breakdown of codex materials, including (but not limited to) natural elements like water, heat, and either too much, or too little, humidity. All of these deteriorate the components of the…