This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Detailing the early 1970s mob scene Mafia at War is an interesting and thorough read. Published by New York Magazine, this book gives an in depth chronology of the mob bosses from the early 1900s to the early…
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Francois Villon was all of those things, and most prominently a subversive outsider. At a time when most poetic works were strongly religious or allegorical Villon wrote with honesty about love and sex, drinking, money problems, and…
The Modern Books and Manuscripts department recently acquired the manuscript of D.H. Lawrence’s short story “Her Turn.” Ten onionskin pages depict a battle of wills between a husband and wife fighting over shares of the husband’s strike pay. The story was timely – Lawrence composed it over a three-day period in March 1912, during a…
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. James Wasserman, author, editor, publisher and occultist, gives us Art and Symbols of the Occult. A disciple of Aleister Crawley’s Ordo Templi Orientis, he has written numerous books on the subject as well as republishing and updating several…
Unsurprisingly, some of the centuries-old books now in Houghton’s library stacks have fared better over time than others. There are many factors that impact the breakdown of codex materials, including (but not limited to) natural elements like water, heat, and either too much, or too little, humidity. All of these deteriorate the components of the…
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. We are lucky to have found three first editions of Traité du chanvre in different bindings as we continue to unpack and catalog items from Santo Domingo boxes. From left to right the images reflect the covers of these copies…
T. S. Eliot’s first magazine was published in an extremely limited edition, with an erratic mixture of upper- and lower-case penciling. Advertised as “A Little Papre” (it is about three inches wide and four inches tall), Fireside first appeared on January 28, 1899, when Eliot was ten. It ran in fourteen installments over the next…
Finding aids for three newly cataloged collections have been added to the OASIS database this month: Processed by Ashley M. Nary and Benjamin Hand: Vanity Fair Caricatures, 1871-1911 (MS Thr 1041) Processed by Bonnie B. Salt: Charles Henry Taylor Collection of Privateering Papers, 1718-1928 (MS Am 1087) Mayhew Family Papers, 1731-1790 (MS Am 977)…
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Several books by the Reverend David Wilkerson and his followers are in the Santo Domingo Collection. Wilkerson, an evangelic pastor who moved to New York because he felt called to help young gang members and drug addicts, recounts…
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Before botox, plastic surgery, and aestheticians, L’horreur!, women were forced to combat aging and maintain beauty the old fashioned way- with tips and remedies from publications such as Comment se guérir? This French publication by the mysterious Dr….
