This post is part of an ongoing series featuring recently cataloged items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. L’antialcoolisme en histoires vraies is a volume that deals with the history of alchoholism and the various effects on all of society. Crafted as lectures and lessons that go with official programs it was written by Dr….
Emily Dickinson’s Birthday Party: Cake, Hope & Camaraderie
Today at Houghton Library, we celebrated the birthday of Emily Dickinson a day before her actual birthday of December 10th with an inspiring gathering of colleagues, scholars and students, faculty and friends. A feature-focus of the party was the serving of Dickinson’s own black cake made by Houghton staff from the manuscript recipe in our…
Footprints of a Bibliographical Ghost
Seymour de Ricci created this bibliographical ghost in his Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada (New York, 1935), in an entry on the library of the late Harvard University Professor Charles Eliot Norton (I, 1059). de Ricci described there three leaves from the Psalter and Hours written probably in…
Cautionary tales
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring recently cataloged items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. As Nazi occupation expanded into France, Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), the avant-garde dramatist, actor, poet, and theorist of the Theatre of Cruelty, was committed to a mental hospital in Rodez. There he came under the care of…
Mad Dog’s i
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring recently cataloged items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Today’s post features an artist named Richard Stine and his book Smile in a Mad Dog’s i. Stine self-published this first edition in 1974 with 4000 copies. Inspired by the receipt books that newsboys used to…
The Gift of Ben Franklin
A recent project seeking to improve and reclaim legacy cataloging data uncovered this artifact of colonial American history, recorded in Houghton’s card-based shelf list but absent until now from our online catalog. This copy of Votes and proceedings of the House of Representatives of the province of Pennsylvania, the first of three volumes printed and…
LIGHTS, [camera], action!
Sometimes, working with the vast resources of the Ward Collection brings up more questions than it answers. Recently while scanning some libretto volumes for “key content,” I ran across some intriguing illustrations in Le theatre italien de Gherardi, a collection of 55 comedies and scenarios performed in Paris by the Comédie-Italienne (one of the precursors…
Sinner man
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items recently cataloged from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. “Here, in this taut, fact-crammed volume, you’ll be taken into the fifteen most infamous vice centers of the entire hemisphere, you’ll see for yourself how crime flourishes within each city.” America’s cities of sin is an anthology of articles…
Election day is upon us!
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Inspired by Election Tuesday and in light of Massachusetts Ballot Question 4 I thought it might be interesting to look at a few ephemeral examples of the legalization of marijuana I recently uncovered within the collection. For those…
Moloch speaks: why I’m voting yes on 4
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items recently cataloged from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Measures to legalize recreational marijuana are on five state ballots this year, including Houghton Library’s home state of Massachusetts. The Santo Domingo Collection naturally includes significant historical matter supporting the movement to legalize, but it also offers…