Ah, patronage. That special arrangement, in which a composer or author contacts someone in High Places, and asks them to lend their name (and/or their money) to a publication. No less a luminary then Blackadder has struggled with its complexities. Scholars today are particularly interested in those little dedications often found at the head of…
Washington the Great, Chief of the Columbians
Alfred the Great drove the invading Danes out of England and coins from his reign dub him “King of the English” in tribute to this victory. In the centuries following his death, he gained a reputation as the monarch who did much to create not only the new nation of England, but also the mythology…
John Adams on Shakespeare, or As You Dislike It
Another year of Shakespeare has drawn to a close. This week on Broadway the curtain came down on the hit show Something Rotten! whose song “I Hate Shakespeare” offered the closest thing to a respite from the past year’s tempest of fulsome tributes. Those weary of the much ado can take heart: the next anniversary…
Perils of drinking
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring recently cataloged items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. L’antialcoolisme en histoires vraies is a volume that deals with the history of alchoholism and the various effects on all of society. Crafted as lectures and lessons that go with official programs it was written by Dr….
Emily Dickinson’s Birthday Party: Cake, Hope & Camaraderie
Today at Houghton Library, we celebrated the birthday of Emily Dickinson a day before her actual birthday of December 10th with an inspiring gathering of colleagues, scholars and students, faculty and friends. A feature-focus of the party was the serving of Dickinson’s own black cake made by Houghton staff from the manuscript recipe in our…
Footprints of a Bibliographical Ghost
Seymour de Ricci created this bibliographical ghost in his Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada (New York, 1935), in an entry on the library of the late Harvard University Professor Charles Eliot Norton (I, 1059). de Ricci described there three leaves from the Psalter and Hours written probably in…
Cautionary tales
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring recently cataloged items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. As Nazi occupation expanded into France, Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), the avant-garde dramatist, actor, poet, and theorist of the Theatre of Cruelty, was committed to a mental hospital in Rodez. There he came under the care of…
Mad Dog’s i
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring recently cataloged items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Today’s post features an artist named Richard Stine and his book Smile in a Mad Dog’s i. Stine self-published this first edition in 1974 with 4000 copies. Inspired by the receipt books that newsboys used to…
The Gift of Ben Franklin
A recent project seeking to improve and reclaim legacy cataloging data uncovered this artifact of colonial American history, recorded in Houghton’s card-based shelf list but absent until now from our online catalog. This copy of Votes and proceedings of the House of Representatives of the province of Pennsylvania, the first of three volumes printed and…
LIGHTS, [camera], action!
Sometimes, working with the vast resources of the Ward Collection brings up more questions than it answers. Recently while scanning some libretto volumes for “key content,” I ran across some intriguing illustrations in Le theatre italien de Gherardi, a collection of 55 comedies and scenarios performed in Paris by the Comédie-Italienne (one of the precursors…