By David Shaw One of the first things fledging historical bibliographers are taught is to identify formats: take a sheet of paper and fold it once to give folio format, fold again to make a quarto gathering, and once again for an octavo. Then they need to know about chain lines, wire lines and where…
Flying carpet
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items recently cataloged from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Richard Halliburton was an American adventurer, journalist, and travel writer who may be best remembered as swimming the length of the Panama canal and only paying 36 cents for his toll. He apparently caught the travel bug while in…
Free love, free land
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items recently cataloged from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Free love and communal living dominated the Counterculture Movement throughout the United States, nowhere as widespread as in San Francisco, California. Young people fled to the Haight-Ashbury district in the late 1960s and early 1970s, seeking…
Prompt Service: Cataloging the HTC Promptbooks
For much of the past year, I have had the pleasure of cataloging promptbooks from the Harvard Theatre Collection. Promptbooks are texts of plays which have been annotated with stage directions, alterations, descriptions of scenery or sound effects, and other details from actual use in the theatre. They function almost like a blueprint to a…
How to Kiss Right
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. This collection includes a lot of erotica, particularly from the 19th-century, but it also includes a lot of sex humor books including this one titled How to do sex properly by Bruce Aiken, Bridgid Herridge and Colin Rowe….
Emily Dickinson Black Cake Video Wins Award
At the first film festival sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries, Harvard Library took first place for Best Collections-Focused Film for Houghton Library’s video on baking Emily Dickinson’s original black cake. Heather Cole, Emilie Hardman, and Emily Walhout created the video as a way to document their attempt to authentically recreate Dickinson’s cake recipe for her 185th birthday celebration…
Search & Destroy
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items recently cataloged from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Launched in 1977, Search & Destroy was the first punk rock and new wave publication to emerge in San Francisco. Created by V. Vale, who began publishing the zine through his employer, City Lights Bookstore, Search…
Epithalamion for Bianca Maria Sforza
Houghton Library recently acquired a rare copy of one of the first independently printed wedding orations. Ad Serenissimum Maximilianum inuictissimu[m] Romanoru[m] rege[m]: in auspicatissimis eius & Augustæ Blanche mariæ nuptiis: Epithalamion. [Milan, Leonardus Pachel after 8 April 1494]. (ISTC im00401800) was written by Giasone del Maino (1435-1519) and delivered in praise of the couple at…