The Vetālapañcaviṃśati, or the twenty-five tales of the corpse-possessing spirit, is an Indian story collection dating back to at least the 11th century CE. The framing narrative tells the story of a king who is tricked into helping an ascetic perform a necromantic ritual in a cremation ground. The king is tasked with the fetching…
New on Oasis in April
Finding aids for eight newly cataloged collections have been added to the OASIS database this month, including a collection of rebuses created by Dorothea Dix, and a bit of Houghton history which marks our 2500th online finding aid….
Whodunit and howdunit?
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Alexandre Lacassagne was a French physician and criminologist in the 19th-century. He founded the Lacassagne School of Criminology which was based in Lyon, France and focused on medical jurisprudence and criminal anthropology. He quite famously gave…
2014 Philip Hofer Prize for Collecting Books or Art
On March 25, 2014, winners of the Philip Hofer Prize for Collecting Books or Art were announced in a ceremony at Houghton Library. The Hofer Prize is awarded each year to a student or students whose collections of books or works of art best reflect the traditions of breadth, coherence, and imagination exemplified in the…
Pacifist rats
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo collection. By the controversial nature of its subject areas, the Santo Domingo Collection naturally includes a wealth of banned, censored, or otherwise suppressed literature. Ronge-maille vainqueur, a text by the French novelist Lucien Descaves and illustrated by…
Explosive Opera
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…