This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Aconitum also known as wolfsbane is a particularly poisonous plant that grows mainly in the Northern hemisphere. Apparently it was historically used to kill wolves thus the reference to the plant as wolfsbane. The image above is…
A Vacation in Normandie
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. With the advent of smartphones and wifi everywhere, travel guidebooks seem like a thing of the past. Back in the late 19th century though, they might have been the only way to find your way around. The guidebook…
Conjoined twins
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Johann Conrad Brunner was a Swiss anatomist that is best known for his work with the pancreas and duodenum. This fold out plate displays both anatomical and skeletal conjoined twin fetuses, which is part of Brunner’s medical dissertation Foetum…
Silhouettes: from Craft to Art
The central scene in this engraving (left) faithfully reproduces an engraved vignette that depicted a method of drawing a silhouette. The vignette was printed in the second volume of Johann Caspar Lavater’s treatise on physiognomy, Physiognomische Fragmente, zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntniss und Menschenliebe published in Leipzig between 1775 and 1778….
New on OASIS in August
Twelve finding aids for newly cataloged collections have been added to the OASIS database this month, including posters from the May 1968 Paris protests and penmanship specimens from 18th century Boston writing schools. Processed by Susan Wyssen: Claude Farrère Papers, 1896-1957 (MS Fr 590) Marseille Heroin Trafficking Collection, circa 1963-1975 (MS Fr 614)…
Komic Kats
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. The comic strip Krazy Kat by George Herriman ran for 31 years in the New York Evening Journal and follows a cast of animal characters set in a highly stylized Arizona home. Although not popular among the…
“Attribute the faute to my ivel hed, and not to my slothful hande”
Houghton has in its collection several letters written or signed by Elizabeth I of England. She wrote one of these letters (cataloged as MS Typ 686) in her own hand to her brother Edward VI, then King of England. It is dated April 21, but there is no given year. It is likely, however, that…
New acquisitions: Unpublished Robert Gould Shaw letters
Robert Gould Shaw famously wrote more than two hundred letters to members of his family over the course of the Civil War. Five unpublished letters from Shaw to his family, and two letters from Shaw’s sister Susanna to Shaw, have recently been added to Houghton’s collection….
Mysterious matchbox
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. This particular item which I believe is an artists’ book is quite interesting, published in Paris in 1990 by Ed. Rouleau Libre it was issued as a matchbox measuring 8 x 6 cm and contains a number of…
John Lindquist Photographic Negatives Project
For the past six weeks, I have had the distinct pleasure of working in the Theatre Collection at Houghton Library, Harvard University as part of a fellowship with the Dance Heritage Coalition, which is supporting eight fellows through an Institute of Museum and Library Services Grant, providing training and practice in dance-related librarianship. My fellowship…