This post is part of an ongoing series featuring recently cataloged items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. This lovely artist book Geheimzinnige Personen : omtrent de flarden des levenswas was created by a Dutch artist, Margit Willems. It loosely translates to Mysterious Persons: on the scraps of life and features 23 linocuts with text…
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…
Washington the Great, Chief of the Columbians
Alfred the Great drove the invading Danes out of England and coins from his reign dub him “King of the English” in tribute to this victory. In the centuries following his death, he gained a reputation as the monarch who did much to create not only the new nation of England, but also the mythology…
John Adams on Shakespeare, or As You Dislike It
Another year of Shakespeare has drawn to a close. This week on Broadway the curtain came down on the hit show Something Rotten! whose song “I Hate Shakespeare” offered the closest thing to a respite from the past year’s tempest of fulsome tributes. Those weary of the much ado can take heart: the next anniversary…
“Fuel for the fire of learning”: Houghton Library Opens its Doors
On this day seventy-five years ago, 3 January 1942, library staff and their families attended a private celebration to mark the opening of the new Houghton Library. As the Second World War raged in two theaters, William A. Jackson, the new Library’s first director, and Philip Hofer, the founding curator of its Department of Printing…
Perils of drinking
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring recently cataloged items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. L’antialcoolisme en histoires vraies is a volume that deals with the history of alchoholism and the various effects on all of society. Crafted as lectures and lessons that go with official programs it was written by Dr….
Emily Dickinson’s Birthday Party: Cake, Hope & Camaraderie
Today at Houghton Library, we celebrated the birthday of Emily Dickinson a day before her actual birthday of December 10th with an inspiring gathering of colleagues, scholars and students, faculty and friends. A feature-focus of the party was the serving of Dickinson’s own black cake made by Houghton staff from the manuscript recipe in our…
Footprints of a Bibliographical Ghost
Seymour de Ricci created this bibliographical ghost in his Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada (New York, 1935), in an entry on the library of the late Harvard University Professor Charles Eliot Norton (I, 1059). de Ricci described there three leaves from the Psalter and Hours written probably in…
Cautionary tales
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring recently cataloged items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. As Nazi occupation expanded into France, Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), the avant-garde dramatist, actor, poet, and theorist of the Theatre of Cruelty, was committed to a mental hospital in Rodez. There he came under the care of…
Mad Dog’s i
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring recently cataloged items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Today’s post features an artist named Richard Stine and his book Smile in a Mad Dog’s i. Stine self-published this first edition in 1974 with 4000 copies. Inspired by the receipt books that newsboys used to…