We are pleased to announce a new online exhibition, “A History of Medieval Christian Preaching,” prepared by Harvard Divinity School Professor Beverly Mayne Kienzle and her students. This site and an exhibition now on display in the Amy Lowell Room accompany a conference of the same name sponsored by Harvard University’s Standing Committee on Medieval…
You’ve Got Mail: Equal to any figure ever painted by Audubon
When Edward Lear received a letter from the British ornithologist William Swainson in November 1831, he must have opened it with great trepidation. The nineteen-year-old artist had recently sent Swainson a portfolio of hand-colored lithographs of parrots and was eagerly waiting to hear his reaction. What a thrill — and a relief — he must have felt…
The Grand Æra of Bibliomania: the Roxburghe Sale of 1812
2012 is the 200th anniversary of the event that could be said to mark the start of the modern era of book collecting: the sale of the library of John Ker, 3rd Duke of Roxburghe. The sale of this extensive and masterfully assembled collection attracted the interest of every major book collector in Britain, its…
You’ve Got Mail: Little Women II: Wedding Marches
Because Little Women is embedded in the American mind as a classic children’s book, readers often forget that Louisa May Alcott always viewed herself as a professional author who wrote in order to make money, much of which went to help support her parents and sisters, and later, nephews and a niece. Between 1868, when…
New exhibition commemorates John Milton Ward
A memorial celebrating the incredible life, teaching, scholarship and collecting of John Milton Ward is being held on Sunday, May 6 at 3pm at Paine Hall in the Harvard Department of Music, where Ward taught for over thirty years. Ward passed away on December 12, 2011. In the 20+ years since his retirement as William…
Edward Lear exhibition opens
Houghton is pleased to announce the opening of a new exhibition, “The Natural History of Edward Lear,” guest-curated by Robert McCracken Peck, Curator of Art and Artifacts and Senior Fellow at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University. The exhibition will be on view in Houghton’s Edison and Newman Room through August 18, 2012….
You’ve Got Mail: Keats in love
In the autumn of 1818, 23-year-old John Keats confessed in a letter to his brother George a fascination for one of his neighbors: “Mrs Brawne…still resides in Hampstead…her daughter senior is I think beautiful and elegant, graceful, silly, fashionable and strange we have a little tiff now and then.” The woman who caught Keats’s attention…
Byron exhibition now online
The online version of the Houghton Library exhibition “Let Satire Be My Song”: Byron’s English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, is now live on the HCL web site. The exhibition is a paratextual excursion through this vitriolic satire in verse, written in part as a response to a hostile review of the poet’s first book, Hours…
Thackeray Bicentenary Exhibition and Symposium
Opening today is “The Adventures of Thackeray In His Way Through the World” a new exhibition marking the 200th anniversary of the birth of William Makepeace Thackeray. Houghton will also host a symposium on Thackeray’s life and work on October 6th. The symposium is free, but advance registration is required; see the website for more…
The Bible in Type
Houghton’s current exhibition, “The Bible in Type, from Gutenberg to Rogers”, marks the 400th anniversary of the publishing of the King James Bible by looking at the history of the Bible as a designed book. It offers viewers the rare opportunity to see such landmarks of printing as the Gutenberg Bible (ca. 1455), the Plantin…