This coming fall will see the opening of Beyond Words: Illuminated Manuscripts in Boston Collections, an exhibition of medieval and Renaissance books from local institutions. The Houghton Library will loan the vast majority of the manuscripts on display, and the library will also act as one of three venues for the exhibition. Preparations are not…
Eccles Cakes from the Archives
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…
Cakes from the Collections and another birthday
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…
Babar Comes to Houghton Library
Houghton Library is pleased to announce two important new acquisitions associated with the iconic children’s book character Babar the elephant. The first of these, thanks to a generous gift from Laurent de Brunhoff and his wife Phyllis Rose, is the complete archive of preparatory materials for the book ABC de Babar by Jean de Brunhoff,…
Shining a spotlight on Hidden Collections
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,…
William King Richardson, Part III: Mischievous Billy Richardson
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…
Poster Swank
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…
Son of The heroism of King George
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…
William King Richardson, Part II: “One of the most remarkable specimens of XVth century binding I have ever seen.”
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…
The Drug Demon
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…