Thomas Hollis is much on our collective mind these days. Houghton Library has recently published “From the Great Desire of Promoting Learning”: Thomas Hollis’s Gifts to the Harvard College Library by William H. Bond, Librarian of Houghton Library from 1965 until 1982. Bond’s checklist documents Hollis’s donations and illuminates his goal in spreading the political…
Reading
What do John Keats’s Shakespeare, Wordsworth’s library catalog, and Victor Hugo’s commonplace book have in common with primers and spellers and other historical materials on learning to read? Each item is among the 1,200 books and manuscripts–comprising more than 250,000 web-accessible pages–now discoverable online in Reading: Harvard Views of Readers, Readership, and Reading History. Developed…
Picturing Prayer featured
Houghton’s website Picturing Prayer (see this previous post) was among those featured at Harvard College Library’s recent Digital Humanities Fair, an event designed to familiarize Harvard faculty and researchers with a few of the many online resources at their disposal. The Picturing Prayer website attracted considerable interest and suggestions were made about how to improve…
Islamic Heritage Project
Hundreds of Islamic books and manuscripts from throughout Harvard University collections, including nearly 500 items from Houghton Library, have now been fully digitized and made available to scholars worldwide. The Islamic Heritage Project, one of several major digitization initiatives from Harvard’s Open Collections Program, encompasses more that 145,000 pages of material, in a wide variety…
Cutting remarks
Richard S. Field, Curator Emeritus of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, Yale University Art Gallery, will give this year’s Philip and Frances Hofer Lecture, on Thursday, December 3, 2009, 5:30 pm, in Houghton’s Edison and Newman Room. Entitled “Cutting Remarks: The Preparation of Woodcuts, 1400-1600”, the talk will discuss the history of the physical craft of…
Winward Prescott Bookplate Collection
[This post adapted from Kenneth Carpenter’s Reader’s Choice exhibition in the Houghton Library ] The largest component of Houghton Library’s notable bookplate collection was the gift of Winward Prescott, class of 1909. Prescott’s interest in bookplates was clearly lifelong, for as early as 1914 he published a bibliography of bookplate literature, which he revised and…
Picturing Prayer
Picturing Prayer: Books of Hours in Houghton Library, Harvard University is a new website devoted to examples of this prevalent form of the medieval book. The site examines the various parts of a typical book of hours, and provides ten examples from Houghton collections, digitized in high resolution from cover to cover, utilizing page-turning software….
Tennessee Williams Additional Papers
Cataloging has recently been completed on the Harvard Theatre Collection’s Tennessee Williams Additional Papers, 1946-1983, ( MS Thr 550.) Details can be found in the finding aid created by senior manuscripts cataloger Bonnie B. Salt. These papers join a wealth of Tennessee Williams material at the Houghton Library and the Harvard Theatre Collection, most notably…
MMajor MMilestone
Houghton’s Technical Services Department today announced that it had added its 2000th finding aid to the OASIS database, Harvard’s online catalog of archival and manuscript collections. The Mary M. Engel collection of “filleuls de guerre” letters is a collection of letters from World War I soldiers to their “godmother” and pen pal, Mary Engel. For…
W.V. Quine Papers
Cataloging is now complete on our collection of the papers of the influential thinker and Harvard philosophy professor Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000). At over 80 boxes, there is a wealth of information on Quine’s life and work. I might stop by to have a look at Series IIE, “Crank letters sent to Quine” (his…