This post is the second in a series on the Eleanor Steber collection to mark the 100th anniversary of her birth. The first post can be seen here. Having an opportunity to explore Eleanor Steber’s music collection has been a real treat for me. Way back in another lifetime while studying opera at The Juilliard…
New on OASIS in June
Finding aids for five newly cataloged collections have been added to the OASIS finding aid database this month, including the diaries of a railroad construction engineer, and a poetry notebook belonging to Sarah Orne Jewett. Processed by Bonnie B. Salt: Sarah Orne Jewett Verse Notebook and Family Autograph Album, 1870-1880 (MS Am 2831) Ernest Lewis…
Comic Mischief
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Newspaper comic strips illuminate society in a way many other mediums cannot. Available on a daily basis, one can track changing trends in cultures by looking at the types of comic humor that was popular at the time. …
Eleanor Steber at 100
This post is the first in a series on the Eleanor Steber collection to mark the centenary of her birth. A full century ago, this July, Eleanor Steber burst upon the world stage. She would later say unblushingly that she wasn’t “just born,” and that she had been “making grand entrances ever since.” Steber was…
Snowblind
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Robert Sabbag’s semi-biographical Snowblind, first published in 1976, tells the story of Zachary Swan, a 1970s cocaine smuggler who relied on scams and ruses to move drugs past customs officials and keep himself out of harm’s way in…
Advice for Young Women
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Written in 1938, Bell Wood-Comstock’s Plain Facts for Young Women on Marijuana, Narcotics, Liquor and Tobacco offers advice for those ladies whose goal is to get married and settle down with children. Wood-Comstock wrote several books on advice…
Grin and Bear It
Early printers often faced the problem of what to do with a page that only had a few lines of type on it–ideally you want a flat, even surface to print from. Oftentimes, they would use “bearer type,” type chosen more or less at random to fill out the page, perhaps lines of type from…
The Adventures of Tintin in Pop-up!
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. “Tintin is myself. He reflects the best and brightest in me: he is my successful double…Tintin has accomplished many things on my behalf.” -Hergé Tintin who was created by Hergé, a pen name of Georges Prosper…
Ludlow’s Hasheesh Eater
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. The Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library, founded in San Francisco in 1970 and formed from the libraries of several private collectors, was a preeminent collection of drug-related literature. Upon its closure, it was acquired by Julio Santo Domingo,…
A Trip through the Spiritual
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. In his book High Tide, Brad Johannsen really brings Herman Hesse and Lao Tzu’s writing to life with colorful and psychedelic illustrations. The book contains the story ‘Piktor’s Metamorphasis,” a spiritual tale telling of loneliness after Piktor has…