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 have made numerous contributions:
- “Lorenzo Torrentino, a Mondovian Printer (1564–1566),” Caroline Duroselle-Melish, then Assistant Curator of Printing and Graphic Arts at Houghton Library and now Curator of Early Modern Books and Prints at the Folger Shakespeare Library
- “Printers’ Devices as Decorative Elements in Library Architecture” and “Cum privilegio: Licensing of the Press Act of 1662,” Karen Nipps, Head, Rare Book Team
- “The Panel Stamp in Early and Modern Bindings,” Janet E. Scinto, former Bibliographic Assistant
- “Dutch-Language Imprints in Colonial America,” Noah Sheola, Bibliographic Assistant
- “Joseph Ames’s Typographical Antiquitiesand the Antiquarian Tradition,” Elaine Shiner, Rare Book Cataloger
A previous series devoted to printers’ devices also saw many submissions from Houghton staff:
- Former manuscript cataloger Diane E. Booton introduced the Renaissance Venetian printer Bernardino Stagnino and several early French printers, among them Michel Angier and Jean Calvez
- Theodore Roosevelt Collection Curator and Assistant Curator of Modern Books & Manuscripts Heather Cole presented the Gnome Press, a fan publisher of science fiction in mid-twentieth century New York. Cole also wrote on Charlotte Guillard, born in the 1480s, “the first woman who distinguished herself in the typographic art”
- Cataloger/Database Management Librarian Vernica M. Downey wrote on the nineteenth-century Boston publishing firm Copeland & Day
- Caroline Duroselle-Melish shared her findings on Abraham Usque, a Sephardic Jew originally from Portugal who published in mid-sixteenth century Ferrara, and on Lelio dalla Volpe, a bookseller at the epicenter of an active cultural milieu in eighteenth-century Bologna
- Karen Nipps took on Matthäus Merian, publisher of the monumental Topographia Germaniae. Nipps also wrote about the Académie des Jeux Floraux, the oldest literary academy in Europe, and about the quarto editions of Shakespeare’s plays
- Janet E. Scinto looked at Mitchell Kennerley, proprietor of New York’s The Little Book-Shop Around the Corner and at the special editions of the Riverside Press
- Éditions de Minuit, founded in occupied Paris in 1941, was the subject of an article by Elaine Shiner, who also wrote on a Russian symbolist printing house
- Former Rare Book Cataloger Evelyn A. Walker wrote on Roberts Brothers, the nineteenth-century Boston publishers whose list included Emily Dickinson and Louisa May Alcott
- John Overholt, Curator of the Donald and Mary Hyde Collection of Dr. Samuel Johnson and Early Modern Books and Manuscripts, chose the printer Pieter Mortier, 1661–1711 as his subject
And in the most recent issue of Library Quarterly, Christina Linklater, who is Project Music Cataloger in the Harvard Theatre Collection and works primarily on the John Milton and Ruth Neils Ward Collection, wrote “Vagaries of the Vaudeville: Notated Music in French Opera Librettos, 1753–1779.” This survey brings together numerous examples of a genre particularly well-represented among the materials given by Professor Ward. It is intended as a companion to an earlier essay by the Ward Project Music Cataloger, Andrea Cawelti, “It’s Good to Be the King: Head-Pieces in Ballard Folio Scores.”
Contributed by Christina Linklater, Project Music Cataloger