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…
Night of a Thousand Stars
Our current exhibition, “Starry Messengers: Signs and Science from the Skies,” will be having its (slightly weather-delayed) opening reception on Tuesday March 10 at 5pm. The exhibition focuses on a series of astronomical events, such as comets, meteors, and supernovas, and shows how these events were viewed by scientists, writers, soothsayers, and others. As the…
Would Don Draper have done enamel sign advertising?
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. If you have been reading this blog consistently then you probably know that we never quite know what we might come across as we unpack a box from this collection. A case in point would be this…
A very Smart copy
Sir George Smart (1776-1867) was an English conductor, organist (quite successful though he declined to use the pedals), pedagogue and composer. He was active on the London music scene for more a half century and calculated towards the end of his life that he had taught precisely 1262 music students and presided over at least…
New on OASIS in March
Finding aids for five newly cataloged collections were added to the OASIS database this month, including the letters from a Turkish prison that formed the basis of the film Midnight Express. Processed by Ashley M. Nary: Documents Concerning Citizens and Town of Medway, Massachusetts, 1762-1798 (MS Am 628) Programs and Playbills from Boston-area Theaters and…
Anti-Opium
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring material from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Today’s feature from the Santo Domingo collection is both a rare volume and an artifact of the fraught history of the opium trade in China. Convened in the 1890s, the Anti-Opium League was part of a movement on the part…
New Exhibit: Occupied Cuba, 1898-1902
The years between the end of the Cuban War of Independence in 1898, facilitated by United States involvement as part of the Spanish-American War, and the proclamation of the Cuban Republic in 1902, were a time of much change and transition in Cuba. After the last of the Spanish troops left Cuba in 1898, the…
A Beatnik Refuge
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Greenwich Village by Fred McDarrah is a history of the New York City neighborhood from its inception as Old Green Village through the 1960s. A detailed account from its time as a Dutch Colony to its incarnation as…
The Two Guildford Mathematicians
The charming town of Guildford, 40 minutes southwest of London on South West Trains, is associated with two famous British logician-mathematicians. Alan Turing (on whom I seem to perseverate) spent time there after 1927, when his parents purchased a home at 22 Ennismore Avenue just outside the Guildford town center. Although away at his boarding…