Today’s cataloging prize is a libretto of L’amore industrioso, text by Ferdinando Casorri. John M. Ward, the collector who donated this item, was particularly interested in the documentary evidence to be found in librettos….
A warning from the High Priestess of Oom
Alma Hirsig’s My Life in a Love Cult….
What’s New: Di Lasso motet partbooks
The Harvard Theatre Collection has just purchased a pair of bound volumes of Orlando Di Lasso motet partbooks, printed in 1588. At this time, music was printed note by note in movable type. Due to the extreme complexity of lining up four, five, or eight parts in a score using this process, most works were…
Unmodified sexuality
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. We return to the occult in this week’s feature from the Santo Domingo Collection. Today’s author is Austin Osman Spare, an English artist, writer, and occultist active in the first half of the twentieth century. While Spare’s finely-wrought…
Explosive Opera
In September, 1662, the Elector of Bavaria and his wife celebrated the christening of their infant son with eight days of public and private festivity. The squares and streets of Munich were lit up, gold coins and commemorative medals struck and bread and wine freely distributed to the populace. Meanwhile, a trilogy of interwoven operas…
You’ve Got Mail: “A Fine Achievement”
Last month Houghton Library acquired two evocative letters from major figures in the English private press movement of the early twentieth century. Houghton has an outstanding collection of the books from all of the Presses and these letters document the close personal relationship between the major figures involved. In the first letter, dated 16 December…
Superb specimens
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo collection. Herbarium for pharmaceutical students was produced by Alban Edward Lomax, a 19th-century pharmacist that hailed from Liverpool, England. An herbarium is essentially a collection of preserved plant specimens typically arranged by a specific nomenclature and classification. …
You’ve Got Mail: “What About Webb’s Beasts”
A recent issue of the United Kingdom’s National Trust Arts, Buildings, Collections Bulletin (Winter 2013-2014) includes a report by Jane Gallagher, Senior Curator for the Midlands, that describes an important acquisition by the Trust and a summer loan from the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and draws on a Houghton Library collection to connect the…
L’Incal
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Julio Santo Domingo collected books across many forms; among them is the graphic novel. Pictured here is one of the great collaborations in French comics: L’Incal, written by Alejandro Jodorowsky, the Chilean-born French filmmaker, actor, and author, and…
What the well-dressed print is wearing
[Thanks to Caroline Duroselle-Melish, Assistant Curator of Printing and Graphic Arts, for contributing this post.] The series of prints, entitled “Salus generis humani”, that are bound in this volume were made in the 1590s by the engraver Aegidius Sadeler II (1570-1629). They were engraved after the work of the Mannerist painter Johan von Achen (1552-1615)…