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…
New on OASIS in March
Finding aids for eight newly cataloged collections have been added to the OASIS database this month, including ballet ephemera, letters of the German scientist Helmholtz, and a collection of 17th century English poetry….
Fuzz against Junk
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Most likely we have all heard the slang of the word “fuzz” to describe a police officer. There appears to be little reliable information to back up the supposition that people indeed used the word during…
L’Incal
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Julio Santo Domingo collected books across many forms; among them is the graphic novel. Pictured here is one of the great collaborations in French comics: L’Incal, written by Alejandro Jodorowsky, the Chilean-born French filmmaker, actor, and author, and…
What the well-dressed print is wearing
[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…