The Master of the Harvard Hannibal was given his name by the art historian Millard Meiss after the artist’s work on the large frontispiece miniature depicting the “Coronation of Hannibal” in volume II of Houghton Library’s MS Richardson 32. The artist trained in Paris in the circle of the Boucicaut Master in the first two…
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…
Printed and Bound at the Monastery
A recent acquisition from Nina Musinsky Rare Books in New York is a copy of Leonardus de Utino’s Sermones de Sanctis, printed, probably rubricated and certainly bound at the Monastery of SS. Ulrich and Afra in Augsburg in 1474. An inscription records it as a gift by Johannes Lescher, Rector of St. Martin’s church in…
Demons and devils
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Though outnumbered by books on drugs and sexuality, the Santo Domingo Collection’s occult works are nonetheless considerable in number. Featured today are two early works on demonology, one by a French political philosopher and statesman, and the other by…
D.H. Lawrence on strike
The Modern Books and Manuscripts department recently acquired the manuscript of D.H. Lawrence’s short story “Her Turn.” Ten onionskin pages depict a battle of wills between a husband and wife fighting over shares of the husband’s strike pay. The story was timely – Lawrence composed it over a three-day period in March 1912, during a…
New on OASIS in September
Finding aids for nine newly cataloged collections, and preliminary box lists for two recent acquisitions, have been added to the OASIS database this month, including a collection of Japanese netsuke carved in the shape of theatrical masks, correspondence of the Emerson family, and posters for musical theater. Processed by Irina Klyagin: Ballet Scores for Productions…
What’s New: Feuillet Fandango!
The Harvard Theatre Collection has just acquired a splendid Feuillet dance notation treasure, in the rare first edition of El noble arte de danzar a la francesa, y española, printed by Pablo Minguet circa 1760….
New acquisitions: Unpublished Robert Gould Shaw letters
Robert Gould Shaw famously wrote more than two hundred letters to members of his family over the course of the Civil War. Five unpublished letters from Shaw to his family, and two letters from Shaw’s sister Susanna to Shaw, have recently been added to Houghton’s collection….
A gift, regifted, now returned
One of my jobs as Curator is to acquire new books for the collection. This is one of the worst books I’ve ever bought. It’s a broken set, missing one of its four volumes. Some of the pages are damaged, and we already have three copies of this edition. So why did I buy it?…
Jullien, Jullien, Jullien!
When I used to think of “classical” music performances in the 19th century, I imagined sedate concerts in hushed concert halls as we enjoy today. Then I got a crash course in reality by working in music libraries….