This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items recently cataloged from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Going for a hike in France? Be sure to bring your favorite pocket atlas! Atlas de poche des plantes des champs, des prairies et des bois : a l’usage des promeneurs et des excursionistes was probably…
School-to-Work program helps with Charles S. Peirce project at Houghton.
A Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School student helped re-house the Peirce papers. For the fourth consecutive year, we have had the opportunity to hire a paid intern from the Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School (CRLS) to learn about our work by helping end-process our collections. Through the School-to-Work program, (STW), the Harvard Union…
Advertising just ain’t what it used to be
It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes I yearn for The Good Old Days. Consider this advertising flier, which our intrepid sheet music surveyor Dana Gee discovered during her inventory of the Historical Sheet Music Collections of Houghton Library and the Harvard Theatre Collection….
Champion of counterculture
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items recently cataloged from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Actuel may just be the magazine equivalent of a cat with nine lives. This French publication has seen some three iterations, beginning as a jazz and alternative music review in 1967. Taken over by Jean-François Bizot…
Flying carpet
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items recently cataloged from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Richard Halliburton was an American adventurer, journalist, and travel writer who may be best remembered as swimming the length of the Panama canal and only paying 36 cents for his toll. He apparently caught the travel bug while in…
Free love, free land
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items recently cataloged from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Free love and communal living dominated the Counterculture Movement throughout the United States, nowhere as widespread as in San Francisco, California. Young people fled to the Haight-Ashbury district in the late 1960s and early 1970s, seeking…
Prompt Service: Cataloging the HTC Promptbooks
For much of the past year, I have had the pleasure of cataloging promptbooks from the Harvard Theatre Collection. Promptbooks are texts of plays which have been annotated with stage directions, alterations, descriptions of scenery or sound effects, and other details from actual use in the theatre. They function almost like a blueprint to a…
How to Kiss Right
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. This collection includes a lot of erotica, particularly from the 19th-century, but it also includes a lot of sex humor books including this one titled How to do sex properly by Bruce Aiken, Bridgid Herridge and Colin Rowe….
Emily Dickinson Black Cake Video Wins Award
At the first film festival sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries, Harvard Library took first place for Best Collections-Focused Film for Houghton Library’s video on baking Emily Dickinson’s original black cake. Heather Cole, Emilie Hardman, and Emily Walhout created the video as a way to document their attempt to authentically recreate Dickinson’s cake recipe for her 185th birthday celebration…
Search & Destroy
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items recently cataloged from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Launched in 1977, Search & Destroy was the first punk rock and new wave publication to emerge in San Francisco. Created by V. Vale, who began publishing the zine through his employer, City Lights Bookstore, Search…