January 31st marks the closing of the centenary of Thomas Merton’s birth. Merton is best known for his 1948 autobiography The Seven Story Mountain, which charted his trajectory from world citizen and aspiring literati to cloistered monk at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky. In addition to writing prose and poetry related…
“50 Centuries of Service to Mankind”
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items recently cataloged from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. A History of Pharmacy in Pictures, a depiction of the history of the pharmaceutical profession through oil paintings, was first conceived by pharmacist and journalist George A. Bender before the Second World War. He was inspired…
Driven bananas by popular songs
Have you ever had an “earworm”, a song stuck in your head? From the Historical Sheet Music Collections, here are some funny takes on show business’ response to the omnipresent songs of the day. The Merry Widow was a popular operetta composed by Franz Lehár, and in 1907 the public’s craze for the music, especially…
Jean-Claude Touche: unknown hero
Many have been the excited blogs I’ve written over the years, highlighting a find in the Ward Collection. It is often difficult to restrain myself from writing about something once a day, given the riches hiding in every box. But sometimes, the discoveries are rather sad, and I thought twice about highlighting this particular score….
“You seem as dull as… a Yale man”
In April of 1892, Harvard sophomore George Doane Wells along with fellow members of the D.K.E. or “Dickey” Theatricals, wrote and produced an original comedic opera, Antony and Cleopatra, or, The Sinner, the Siren, and the Snake. The Dickey Theatricals were part of the Institute of 1770, a social club for Harvard sophomores which eventually…
Home grown
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items recently cataloged from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Touted as Europe’s first dope magazine, Home Grown’s first publication was in 1977 and presented an “enlightened and informative, as well as entertaining, attitude to dope and related subjects – views and approaches not expressed by the…
Historical sheet music collections: The many faces of “Hawaiian Butterfly”
SHEET MUSIC 159 (O) Sheet music was often marketed by association with popular vaudeville, Broadway or movie stars. This tune from 1917, Hawaiian Butterfly, was published by Leopold Feist with at least eleven different vaudeville stars and teams pictured in the cover inset. The graphics and text are the same, as is the publisher’s plate…
Historical sheet music collections: The Heroism of King George
In our recent investigations of Houghton’s historical sheet music collections, I ran across an unusual score of the anthem God Save the King. The score included an unfamiliar verse by Mr. Sheridan at the bottom of the first leaf, and I couldn’t find the imprint recorded anywhere (though frequently libraries don’t catalog their sheet music…
This is a political newspaper/This is not a political newspaper
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items recently cataloged from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. During the blossoming of the counterculture movement of the late 1960s, San Francisco saw the formation of an anarchist collective: the Diggers. Taking inspiration (and their name) from the 17th century English Protestant radical group which…
Historical sheet music collections: Dancing Downton-style!
Some terrific dance music for a grey Wednesday – some genteel, early-Downton-Abbey era numbers, and some a bit more scandalous:…