If you watched the opening ceremony of the Winter Games, then you recall being given a sweeping lesson in Russian culture brought to you by letters from the Cyrillic alphabet. The pageant’s producer, Konstantin Ernst, made no secret of his inspiration: at the start of the program opened next to a dreaming girl named Lubov…
La Danse Macabre
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo collection. Eros, it should now be obvious, is intrinsic to the Santo Domingo Collection; it follows that Thanatos can’t be far behind. This lavish volume by Éditions Kra is entitled La Danse Macabre, and consists of twenty images by…
DIY Devil
Franz Lehár’s operetta Die lustige Witwe opened at the Theater an der Wien on December 30th, 1905, and stayed open. The show was so immediately and immensely popular that instead of concluding at the end of the season for the customary summer hiatus, it simply kept running: by April 1907 it had been performed 400…
Not suitable for snuggling
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. These oddities, from fancy drawn, May surely raise the question, Will DARWIN say- by Chance they’re formed, Or ‘Natural Selection?’ Edward William Cooke originally published Grotesque Animals : invented, drawn, and described in 1872, this version…
New on OASIS in February
Finding aids for nine newly cataloged collections have been added to the OASIS database this month, including a collection of letters by Johann Strauss, scrapbooks from the Theodore Roosevelt collection, and decorative tiles depicting scenes from Shakespeare….
The adventures of I-Am-The-Man
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo collection. Today’s feature is Etidorhpa, or The end of the earth, a fantastical novel by pharmacologist John Uri Lloyd, written in the hollow-earth mold of Jules Verne’s Journey to the center of the earth. The title is, as observant…
New Digitization October-December 2013
Here are the complete works and collections we’ve digitized in the last three months. Highlights include Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Louis Stevenson manuscripts, photographs of the home of Sarah Orne Jewett, and an illustrated Dutch incunabulum on the destruction of Troy….
The Enduring Classical Tradition IV
This elegiac title page introduces 8 leaves of engravings and 2 pages of printed text, reveals a poignant personal story and is the occasion for another blog on the theme of Enduring Classics. Lucernae veterum was was published, presumably in Nuremberg, on 9 February 1653 and records the death in Lyons on 13 January 1653…
The “Glo” of Advertising
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. The Day-Glo Designer’s Guide offers insights into the way that Day-Glo colors have been used in both art and advertising. Although Day-Glo is common today, the process wasn’t discovered until 1934 by Robert and Joseph Spitzer. While…
The Enduring Classical Tradition III
These 14 leaves of manuscript notes record a week-long trip in July 1849 of a group of British antiquaries along a portion of Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland. Hadrian’s Wall is a defensive fortification system, begun in 122 AD under the orders of the Emperor Hadrian, to mark the northernmost extent of the Roman empire, and…