This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo collection. Eros, it should now be obvious, is intrinsic to the Santo Domingo Collection; it follows that Thanatos can’t be far behind. This lavish volume by Éditions Kra is entitled La Danse Macabre, and consists of twenty images by…
The adventures of I-Am-The-Man
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo collection. Today’s feature is Etidorhpa, or The end of the earth, a fantastical novel by pharmacologist John Uri Lloyd, written in the hollow-earth mold of Jules Verne’s Journey to the center of the earth. The title is, as observant…
The Enduring Classical Tradition IV
This elegiac title page introduces 8 leaves of engravings and 2 pages of printed text, reveals a poignant personal story and is the occasion for another blog on the theme of Enduring Classics. Lucernae veterum was was published, presumably in Nuremberg, on 9 February 1653 and records the death in Lyons on 13 January 1653…
The Enduring Classical Tradition III
These 14 leaves of manuscript notes record a week-long trip in July 1849 of a group of British antiquaries along a portion of Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland. Hadrian’s Wall is a defensive fortification system, begun in 122 AD under the orders of the Emperor Hadrian, to mark the northernmost extent of the Roman empire, and…
What’s New: annotated Lully score
The Harvard Theatre Collection has recently acquired a sensational annotated Jean Baptiste Lully score of Proserpine. Printed in 1680, this score was the second partition générale (full orchestra score) printed by Christophe Ballard (1641-1715), following Bellérophon, which was printed in 1679. These luxurious large folio scores broke out of the previous French printing tradition of…
A Love Affair in Camera
To mark Vivien Leigh’s centenary year, we thought of reproducing here a few of the hundreds of portraits of her by photographer Angus McBean. McBean was the dean of theatrical portraiture for the London stage at midcentury. For over three decades Vivien Leigh was his muse. A single portrait—his favorite of her—hung in his home…
The Enduring Classical Tradition II
A second recent acquisition which reflects the theme of the Enduring Classical Tradition is Jeremiah Holmes Wiffen’s Verses Written in the Portico of the Temple of Liberty at Woburn Abbey, on the Placing before it the Statues of Locke and Erskine, in the summer of 1835. London: James Moyes, 1836. According to the colophon in the…
The Enduring Classical Tradition I
This is the first of a series of posts about recent acquisitions by the Department of Early Books and Manuscripts in Houghton Library of classical material which reflect the continuing use of material that falls inside and outside the Department’s traditional chronological division (material before 1600) of the Library’s curatorial departments. The first is Jacques Charpentier…
The Oldest Student in France and the Champion of the World
The Department of Modern Books and Manuscripts has recently acquired a set of 29 business cards produced between the late 1800s and the 1930s in France (FC9.D4751.Q890c). A good deal of information was packed onto these small, square pieces of paperboard as the people for whom they were made did not shy away from vaunting…
Houghton Acquires an Astronomical Rarity
One of the strengths of our collection is in the history of astronomy, and particularly an outstanding collection of the works of Johannes Kepler. So I’m very pleased to announce that we have just acquired the rarest work in Kepler’s bibliography, Ad Rerum Coelestium Amatores Universos … De Solis Deliquio. This slim volume documents an…