I recently had the great pleasure of assisting a Jane Austen scholar who was looking for book evidence of English circulating libraries during Austen’s lifetime. At first I thought that the assignment would be a piece of cake, since I’d run across a fair amount of 18th and 19th century French subscription library evidence in…
Urdu Punch
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring material from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Punch, the seminal British satirical magazine, is credited with popularizing the use of ‘cartoon’ to mean a comic drawing, rather than a preliminary sketch for a painting or tapestry. During the time of the British Raj, a number of publications…
Myths of London
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Although at first glance London Walkabout by Andrew Collins looks like a typical pamphlet for a tourist it actually is much more unusual. Subtitled “Your guide to discovering the myths and legends of ten mystical sties in and…
Shall I read your future?
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Death. Typically depicted as a skeleton with a sickle, one might suppose that if this card appeared in a tarot reading that you should prepare for an untimely demise, but it rarely signifies a physical death. Tarot card…
Crowley and the Beast
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. The Santo Domingo Collection continues to bolster Harvard’s library of works by author and occult leader Aleister Crowley. These range from substantive books on magic to pamphlets containing individual poems (one of these, titled “Tyrol”, is a condemnation of…
Re-Sounding Wallace Stevens
“It is/ A sound like any other. It will end,” writes Wallace Stevens in “It Must Change,” a sequence whose audible existence (at least as rendered in the poet’s voice) had until this Fall to a certain extent ceased. The lacquer microgroove disc of “It Must Change,” recorded 60 years ago this month, on October…
Street Art in the 1970s
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. The Faith of Graffiti presents the reader with beautiful full-spread photographs of street art by Jon Naar and Mervyn Kurlansky with an accompanying text by Norman Mailer. By keeping the text separate in the center of the book, the…
New on OASIS in November
Finding aids for three newly cataloged collections, all part of the Fredric Woodbridge Wilson Collection of Theater, Dance and Music, have been added to the OASIS database this month: Processed by Ashley M. Nary Photographs of 20th-Century Theatrical Productions and Motion Pictures, 1901-1994 (MS Thr 1042) Sheet Music Featuring Songs from Jacques Offenbach’s Operas, 1868…