Theodore Roosevelt was arguably the first truly modern president; nowhere is this more evident than in the thousands of photographs taken of him which capture his larger-than-life personality and incredibly productive life. The Theodore Roosevelt Collection photographs, comprising over a hundred boxes of several thousand images, are the most heavily used materials within the…
Glossing the Law in Houghton Library MS Typ 121
So why would the Ames Foundation, which focuses on the history of law, want to have Houghton MS Typ 121 digitized? There are dozens of manuscripts of the Digestum vetus, roughly the first third of Justinian’s Digest or Pandects, which is itself the largest part of the Corpus Iuris Civilis, the compilation of texts of…
Adventures of Fido
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Le Aventures de Fido Caniche by surrealist artist Valentine Hugo, is an intricately detailed picture book that follows a dream sequence of Fido, an innocent, inquisitive poodle. In the dream Fido visits other exotic animals including a peacock…
The masterful work of the “Naval Binder”
This story starts with a little database clean-up. (Hold that yawn!) Two unrelated items in HOLLIS had the same call number. There are any number of reasons why this might have happened, but figuring out that riddle was less important than finding the erroneously-numbered book. The title in question was a curious little volume, an…
British pop art
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Gerald Laing was an artist that was part of the British Pop movement in the 1960s and remains one of the most well-known today. His work in this period was typically a painting of a reproduced image often a drag…
New on OASIS in September
Finding aids for nine newly cataloged collections, and preliminary box lists for two recent acquisitions, have been added to the OASIS database this month, including a collection of Japanese netsuke carved in the shape of theatrical masks, correspondence of the Emerson family, and posters for musical theater. Processed by Irina Klyagin: Ballet Scores for Productions…
Burroughs in pulp
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo collection. William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) looms large among countercultural figures of 20th-century literature. The seminal Naked lunch is a famous source of controversy – it was banned in Boston in 1962, and ultimately redeemed in a 1966 obscenity trial before…
What’s New: Feuillet Fandango!
The Harvard Theatre Collection has just acquired a splendid Feuillet dance notation treasure, in the rare first edition of El noble arte de danzar a la francesa, y española, printed by Pablo Minguet circa 1760….
Paper Planes
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. One very unique book by celebrated German-American artist Peter Max, Paper Airplane Book, showcases both his artistic talent as well as his playful attitude towards his work. Entirely consisting of templates for paper planes, each sporting bright colors…
The Poet as Naturalist: Thomas Gray’s copy of Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae
Among the most precious books from the library of Charles Eliot Norton, Harvard’s first Professor of Art History, is the poet Thomas Gray’s copy of Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae. Gray’s youthful interest in natural history was fostered by his uncle Robert Antrobus, an Assistant Master at Eton; in his later years he cherished his uncle’s copy…