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…
Spooktacular!
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…