Finding aids for four newly cataloged collections have been added to the OASIS database this month: Processed by Monique Duhaime and Melanie Wisner: W. Clarkson (Firm) costume designs (MS Thr 571) William Berry Clarkson was born in 1861 into a family of perruquiers (wig-makers) and by the age of twelve was working in the business….
New on OASIS in July
Finding aids for two newly cataloged collections have been added to the OASIS database this month: Processed by Michael Austin: Johnny Green Additional Papers (MS Thr 569) Conductor, arranger, and composer Johnny Green, Harvard AB 1928, achieved early fame as a songwriter and orchestra leader in the 1920s and 1930s. Among his most well known…
The American Minstrel Show Collection
[Thanks to Senior Manuscript Cataloger Bonnie Salt for contributing this post] A large and historically important collection of American minstrelsy materials has just been cataloged for the Harvard Theatre Collection and the finding aid is now available on OASIS: American Minstrel Show Collection (MS Thr 556)…
Filling in the cracks
[Thanks to Ward cataloger Andrea Cawelti for providing the basis for this post.] Carl Maria von Weber’s opera Der Freischütz was an immediate hit when it was first performed in Berlin in 1821, creating strong demand for a printed score. Like nearly all musical scores of the time period, the score was printed from engraved…
Hofer Prize winners announced
Harvard graduate student Philipp Penka was awarded first place in this year’s competition for the Philip Hofer Prize for Collecting Books or Art, for his collection of works published by Russian displaced persons following World War II. The Hofer Prize, named for a former Houghton curator and donor, is awarded each year to the Harvard…
Who’s got the Button? Houghton!
The highlight of the recent auction at Sotheby’s of items from the James S. Copley Library was a letter signed by Button Gwinnett. Gwinnett’s is a name that is familiar mostly only to autograph collectors: he was one of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence. Because he died in a duel less than…
Rare photograph discovered at Houghton
Conservators at Weissman Preservation Center have discovered that a photograph from the William James collection was made with the rare Kallitype process, a predecessor to gelatin silver prints. Read the full story at Harvard College Library News….
Turning Lead into Gold
Author Stephen O. Saxe will give this year’s Philip and Frances Hofer Lecture on April 20, 2010, at 5:30 pm, in Houghton’s Edison and Newman Room. The talk is entitled “Turning Lead into Gold: Nineteenth-Century American Type Foundries and Their Specimen Books” and is free and open to the public. From a shaky beginning in…
London Theater Music during the First Decade of the Eighteenth Century
[This post adapted from Dr. Kathryn Lowerre’s Reader’s Choice exhibition in the Houghton Library] Music was an integral part of the lively London theater world of the beginning of the eighteenth century. In late 1700, noble subscribers underwrote a competition offering cash prizes for the composer whose setting of poet and playwright William Congreve’s The…
Ward Collection featured “Treasure” in Harvard Magazine
The Harvard Theatre Collection, part of Houghton Library, has been enriched in thousands of ways by the collecting zeal of William Powell Mason Professor of Music Emeritus John M. Ward and the late Ruth Neils Ward. Professor Ward is developing collections which reflect the uses of music in opera, ballet and social dance; his collection…