This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Before Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert there was a man named Alan Abel. Actor, writer, filmmaker, comedian, jazz musician and professional prankster these are all the many faces of Abel. For the past half-century Abel has been…
David Garrick’s “Inscription for Wolf[e]”
Inscription for Wolf [first four lines struck out: What Epitaph, or Monumental Pile, Sacred to Gratitude, and Martial Fame, Worthy of Wolf, & worthy of this Isle, Shall tell his Actions, & record his name? ] The Nation’s Glory is [struck out: the Wolf’s his] My Monument, The Adamantine Pillars, Publick Good, The…
Houdini’s bronze of Bernhardt
Newly cataloged from the Harvard Theatre Collection, a bronze statuette linking Harry Houdini to The Divine Sarah The episode began with a fumbled gesture to honor the 72-year-old French actress during her final American tour. The gift, a bronze cast of Bernhardt as the Queen of Spain in Victor Hugo’s Ruy Blas, was presented at…
Exploring the origins of “African American”
Update: The sermon has now been digitized in full and can be seen here. Fred Shapiro, associate director of the Yale Law School Library, recently brought to our attention an important and possibly unique sermon in Houghton’s collections. A 16-page pamphlet entitled A Sermon on the Capture of Lord Cornwallis is notable for the attribution…
Beloved Detective Holmes
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Although fan fiction is cropping up everywhere now and seems to be a new fad, it has actually been around for quite some time. Fictitious characters have often inspired imaginative readers who go on to write their own…
Fashion in Vienna
Want the latest fashions for the 1820s? Just head to Vienna. I’ve seen fashion plates (and in the Ward Collection, costume plates of course) from Paris, but how did Ward manage to find fashion plates for the enlightened Viennese theater-goer?…
Yak Hair, Klingons, and Orson Welles
For over 70 years, Robert Fletcher ‘45 has designed costumes and sets for a remarkably diverse portfolio of stage, film, and television productions. He is probably best known for his work on the first four Star Trek films (covered in a previous entry here), but that is only a small portion of his long, still…
Dogs will be 10 inches only
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Massachusetts is known for many things- ridiculously high taxes, fanatical sports teams, and this year “historic” winter storms. What I was unaware of until now were the seemingly crazy laws that exist in our history until I started…
By Houghton, about Houghton
This post is first in a planned recurring feature sharing scholarly activities by Houghton Library staff. Each issue of Library Quarterly includes a short article devoted to some aspect of the rich field of printing history. Since the History of the Book feature began with the January 2013 issue, Houghton Library staff past and present…
Destroy this collection
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring material from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Today’s featured item from the Santo Domingo Collection is L’internationale hallucinex (Le Soleil Noir: 1970), a collection of writings by French, American, and English countercultural authors in the form of a series of pamphlets. The collection announces its subversive intent…