This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items recently cataloged from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. On Easter Sunday in 1984, English experimental video art and music group Psychic TV conducted a performance at the Massachusetts College of Art. Physic TV members Genesis P-Orridge and John Gosling were interviewed after this performance,…
Last December, in the first of a series of we’re now calling “Cakes from the Collection,” we made Emily Dickinson’s 20 pound black cake. Recently, Team Cake gathered again to produce the second in our series, a very different challenge in the form of delicately crisp Eccles Cakes. Our friends in England will not require any instruction on the nature…
Today at Houghton, July 8, we celebrated the birthday of our beloved patron Mary Hyde Eccles (1912-2003) with cake and a song. The cake, Eccles cakes to be specific, were spiced currant puff pastries, made (sort of) according to Mary’s own recipe (see here for more details on them!), which is housed here at Houghton…
At “hands in the air” in the style of MasterChef at the end of her own arduous MasterSurvey, Dana Gee marks the finish of our own six-month endurance test. Our Hidden Collections Grant to explore strange new worlds of backlog, to seek out new sheet music, to boldly go where no one has gone before,…
It is good to see good work being done by colleagues on a great collection. But let’s not be too solemn about the collector and the collected, no matter his degrees and trophies. After all, he wasn’t. “Billy” traveled in certain social circles and had a lot of fun in doing so. Edith Wharton, the…
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items recently cataloged from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. For some 40 years, Poster Auctions International has been holding auctions at Rennert’s Gallery in New York City for their collection of rare vintage posters. This collection spans art noveau, art deco, and modern pieces of…
It has already been a busy summer. I had the great good fortune last week to take another Rare Book School course, The Stationers’ Company to 1775, taught by the extraordinary Ian Gadd. Now, you may ask, what the heck is The Stationers’ Company? Basically, it is what today we would call a guild, which…
In April the library began a three month project entering provenance information from Houghton incunabula into the Manuscript Evidence in Incunabula database (MEI). Maintained by the Consortium of European Research Libraries, MEI enables scholars to research and compare copy-specific features in incunabula across an international multitude of repositories. These two sets of image show the…
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items recently cataloged from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Published in 1940, Narcotics: Destroyer of Mind and Body or The Drug Demon warns Americans about the dangers of drug addiction “found not only in the large cities…but also in towns, villages and isolated spots.” The…
William King Richardson (1859–1951) was a member of the Harvard College Class of 1880. Just two years later he earned a double first at Balliol College, Oxford University (purportedly the first American to obtain this distinction at Oxford). His library was begun at the Lord Amherst of Hackney sale in 1908. For more than forty…
