Today marks the 70th anniversary of the Broadway debut of The Glass Menagerie, a production which would launch Tennessee Williams’ career and set him onto a trajectory wherein any discussion of the greatest American playwright would include his name. The Harvard Theatre Collection has been acquiring significant holdings related to Williams’ productions since the 1940s,…
There’s an app for that
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring material from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Henri Austruy, born in 1871, was an attorney and editor of the journal La nouvelle revue from 1913 to 1940, when occupying Nazi forces shut the journal down. 1940 is also the approximate date of Austruy’s unrecorded death, which may…
Venom for Luther, Spectacles for Calvin
A Poet and Scourge of Heretics Collects His Verses, Binds Them for Presentation, Tidies Up His Texts, and Touches Up the Illustrations. Houghton Library’s excellent Neo-Latin poetry collection (thank you, Roger Stoddard) received a notable and rare addition this month when Bill Stoneman, Curator of Early Books and Manuscripts, purchased a sammelband of more than…
It’s the drapery, stupid!
It’s been a loooong winter here in Cambridge. I don’t know, perhaps that is why when this particular waltz crossed my desk, the cover leapt out at me. The lithography and chromolithography of the 1840s and 50s sheet music covers can be simply breathtaking: I’m continually astonished by their sophistication and technical complexity. In this…
Skills for Kids
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Although most of the items in the Santo Domingo Collection are geared towards adults there are some great exceptions. Discover Skills for Life is a teaching tool for elementary schools that addresses wide ranging topics from building self-esteem…
Calling all Reyer scholars
Last night, I pulled a score out of a box to catalog, with the innocuous identification of Reyer. La Statue. I was vaguely familiar with this work, having cataloged several issues of the vocal score some years ago, in the Ward Collection of Opera Scores at our Loeb Music Library. I thought to myself, oh…
The Sarah Orne Jewett library project
The following is the fifth part in a series on books from the library of Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) and her family. Houghton Library is home to many author’s libraries or portions of libraries—Bronson Alcott, William James, Thomas Carlyle, the Dickinson family, John Keats, and more. Houghton “inherited” a number of these author libraries from…
The Master of the Harvard Hannibal
The Master of the Harvard Hannibal was given his name by the art historian Millard Meiss after the artist’s work on the large frontispiece miniature depicting the “Coronation of Hannibal” in volume II of Houghton Library’s MS Richardson 32. The artist trained in Paris in the circle of the Boucicaut Master in the first two…
Go ahead, judge these books by their covers!
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. One of the many pleasures of working with this collection is the amazing graphic nature of the cover art on books, newspapers, and magazines that we encounter on a daily basis. After seeing the success of Scanning Key…
A Guide to Hipsters
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. The Hipsters, a book by Ted Joans, is a collection of collages of paintings that depicts Greenwich village and the types of people that lived there. He explains many types from the Folknik to the Hipper-than-thounik. The folkniks “carry…