Houghton Library at Harvard has an incomparable set of materials relating to Edward Lear—the largest, most diverse collection in the world: his natural history illustrations, thousands of landscape paintings, travel journals, diaries, letters, nonsense books and manuscripts, and personal documents including musical scores. This is the first of four blogs by Matthew Bevis, Professor of English Literature…
Solar Eclipses and Citizen Science
As you’ve probably heard, a solar eclipse will be visible in the U.S. today from coast to coast. The PBS television program NOVA will air a special episode tonight including live footage of the eclipse, and talking about the history and scientific significance of solar eclipses. Back in April, a film crew visited Houghton in…
A century of John Milton Ward
Today, John Milton Ward, the donor of the Harvard Theatre Collection’s Ward Collection, would have been 100 years old. Having spent most of my formative Harvard years working with him, I’d like to take a moment to share some thoughts on this auspicious occasion. I began working for John Ward in 2002, so his professor…
Climbing that career ladder
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…
Nineteenth-Century Bound Sheet Music Volumes Part II: Souvenir of the Confederacy
Most bound volumes in our collection that are about one inch thick contain between thirty and forty individual pieces. This volume, unassuming as it is, contains ninety three….
Nineteenth-Century Bound Sheet Music Volumes Part I: Edith Forbes Perkins volumes
With one of this summer’s Pforzheimer fellowships came the opportunity for frequent trips to a remote corner of Houghton Library’s sub-basement level, where several hundred bound sheet music volumes lay waiting to be catalogued. Thanks to Dana Gee’s extraordinary work with the Hidden Collections Sheet Music project, tens of thousands of loose sheet music scores…
Undergraduates at Houghton, Part III: Iberian Books Project
A sure-fire way to learn just how rare the books in a rare book library can be is to try documenting potential evidence of their existence. Since May, I have scanned images of 164 books and pamphlets at Houghton. The demands of the task required me to call for items in batches, instead of attempting…
Catnip not just for cats
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items recently cataloged from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Plantas que curan y plantas que matan written in Spanish by Arias Carbajal certainly makes a splashy impression with its pulpy cover. The title translates to “plants that cure and plants that kill” and includes both theoretical and practical…
Join the Conspiracy!
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items recently cataloged from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. In late summer 1968, delegates gathered in Chicago for the 35th Democratic National Convention. It had been a year of war, assassinations, and riots. The North Vietnamese launched the Tet offensive in January. Martin Luther King,…
Undergraduates at Houghton, Part II: Material Evidence in Incunabula
A number of Houghton Library incunables—books printed using moveable type before 1501—were donated between 1955 and 1965 by Ward M. Canaday, member of the Harvard College class of 1907. Several of those books were deposited in Houghton by Adriana R. Salem before being purchased by Canaday; Cambridge had been the end-point of Salem’s trans-Atlantic journey…