This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Description of the Retreat, an institution near York, for insane persons of the Society of Friends is a volume by Samuel Tuke who was a Quaker and mental-health reformer in early 19th-century England. Tuke believed in this new…
Auspicious Debuts: Dear Liar
On July 31, 1957, a thin crowd at MIT’s Kresge Auditorium in Cambridge, Mass. listened as Jerome Kilty (Harvard ’41) and Cavada Humphrey read—or pretended to read—from the correspondence of George Bernard Shaw, “the well-known vegetarian,” and famed English actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Campbell. Perhaps some day, if you are very good and behave properly…
Gigantic Bats in Space!
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Voyage dans la lune avant 1900 is an extraordinary French children’s book that is composed primarily of color lithographs by Herold & Cie., which are based on the original designs of A. de Ville d’Avray’s. Almost nothing about…
The works of David Gasgoyne
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. The Santo Domingo collection is broad in scope, but its many volumes also accommodate exhaustive collecting of a number of particular authors. Among these is David Gascoyne (1916-2001), the British poet and translator known for his association with…
What’s New: Acquisitions from the Collection of Charlotte and Arthur Vershbow
In the second half of the twentieth century Charlotte and Arthur Vershbow of Boston formed a notable private rare book collection. They were close friends of Philip Hofer, founding curator of Houghton Library’s Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, and their collecting was deeply influenced by Hofer’s collection and attitude toward collecting. After the deaths…
What’s New: Italian opera seria manuscripts from the library of the Ducs de Luynes
The Harvard Theatre Collection recently purchased an interesting collection of manuscript 18th century opera arias at Sotheby’s. Owned by the Ducs de Luynes, and kept in their ancestral Château de Dampierre, some of these arias may have been in the D’Albert family since before the French Revolution. An intriguing provenance indeed, which raises many questions:…
Lost Books
In early June, the Library received this message from Maria Barrera: “I purchased from a flea market vendor a book that I believe belongs to the Harvard Libraries. It does bear the seals of Harvard College Library and lacks any note that may indicate it was withdrawn. I am enclosing pictures of the seals and…
Theatrical designs by Domenico Ferri
In 2010 the Harvard Theatre Collection acquired Choix de decorations du Théâtre Royale Italien (Paris, [1838]; call number pf TS 239.208.5), a rare suite of twelve lithographs by different hands after theatrical scene designs by Domenico Ferri (1795-1878), a Bolognese architect and artist who spent most of his active career in Paris. All but the final…
You’ve Got Mail: Eight Further Unpublished Letters by William Morris
On 4 April 2013 books, manuscripts, and art work from the collection of Laurence W. Hodson (1864-1933) were auctioned at Bloomsbury Auctions in London. Hodson also sold books and manuscripts from his library in 1906, but this most recent auction will allow scholars to evaluate more effectively Hodson’s role as an important art collector; as…
What’s New: Colorful Adventures
Two recent acquisitions in the Early Modern Books and Manuscripts department have plenty of colorful adventures, both literally and metaphorically. The first is a card game (call number pFB7.L5633.G800g) based on the classic picaresque novel L’Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane by Alain Rene Le Sage, first published in 1715. Houghton already holds a set…