Early eighteenth-century manuscript miscellanies of French music offer a wealth of insight into contemporary public and private musical tastes and activities. Two such miscellanies in the John Milton and Ruth Neils Ward Collection reveal especially fascinating histories of compilation practices and use….
Indian subcontinent in 60 engravings or less…
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Frans Balthazar Solvyns was born in Antwerp in 1760 and for the early part of his career was a marine painter capturing the likenesses of ships, ports, and harbor views on canvas. He departed for Calcutta…
A Spiritual Guide
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Charles Berner offers his road to spiritual freedom in the short, pamphlet-like book, Enlightenment. Illustrated by Peter Max, this book has detailed instructions, including a sample schedule for a day of Enlightenment Intensive at the Institute of Ability,…
The Beats Go On
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring material from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Published in 1952, John Clellon Holmes’s lightly-fictionalized autobiographical novel Go was the first literary depiction of the Beat generation – Kerouac’s On the Road was extant, but only in typescript. On the Road was among the works that would later eclipse…
Russian prints from the Nathalie Ehrenbourg-Mannati collection
One hundred Russian lubok prints, or lubki, acquired by Houghton in 1961 from the collection of Nathalie Ehrenbourg-Mannati, were recently cataloged as part of our hidden collections cataloging initiative….
REEL WRITING podcast series
Reel Writing: Poems and prose off and on the tape reel, brought to you by Houghton Library and the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard University, is a podcast series by Virginia Rose Marshall. Virginia is a recent graduate of Harvard University and one of the 2015 recipients of the Houghton Library Undergraduate Fellowship. Three episodes…
Let’s take a bite out of crime!
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. The collection has a large number of French translations of books that deal with crime and criminals in the United States. Chicago : ville du crime or Rattling the cup on Chicago crime was written by Edward…
The Bon Ton Skillig List
Here is a recently cataloged “Skellig list” broadside from the city of Cork, Ireland. A Skellig (or Skillig) list is a poem pairing up local bachelors and unmarried women, giving the subjects false names; but they were easily identifiable to local residents, given their age and physical descriptions (flattering or insulting), how long they have…
Exploring Advertising
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Although the marketing and branding world was very different in 2002, Jean Jacques Evrard and Brice Auckenthaler still present interesting and relevant insight in their book What If? Insights into brand trends and the birth of new target…
Ginsberg for sale
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring material from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. The Beats continue their expansion onto Houghton’s shelves by means of Santo Domingo Collection accessioning; Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) is the most recent author to attain fuller representation in our catalog. Ginsberg books in the collection range from the slightest volume…