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…
Black Hero Comics of the 1970s
Capitalizing on the popularity of Blaxploitation films, Marvel introduced several comic titles headlining black hero characters in the 1970s. Some of these characters had made previous appearances in Marvel comics. In 1966, Black Panther becomes Marvel’s first black (African) superhero (Fantastic Four #52) and Dr. Bill Foster, later to become Black Goliath, is introduced as…
Symbolists and Decadents
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Many volumes in the Santo Domingo Collection are about fine art, some exploring the limits of social acceptability whereas others recount more commonly seen art. Symbolists and Decadents by John Christian gives an interesting and thorough examination of…
Reconstructing Gallenberg
Wonderful news: my predecessor as Ward Music Cataloger here at Houghton, Morris S. Levy, has just published a modern edition of the full score to Furio Camillo, one of the manuscript Wenzel Robert von Gallenberg ballets in the Ward Collection, which Morris researched under the auspices of a Houghton Visiting Fellowship. He has been working…
Starry Messengers: The Trailer
You have a little bit less than a month left to catch our current exhibition, Starry Messengers: Signs and Science from the Skies, before it closes on May 2nd. If you’d like a sneak peek, this short video features a conversation among Houghton’s John Overholt, the curator of the exhibition, Sara Schechner, Curator of Harvard’s…