This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items recently cataloged from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Manual medico-legal des poisons… is a curious French text that appears to be primarily about the legal aspects of poisoning. It also includes instructions on how to treat snakebites, the bites of rabid animals, as well…
Houghton Library Fellowships for Harvard Undergraduates
Last summer we hosted the first three Houghton Library undergraduate fellows in their work as they wrote an opera, recorded podcasts, and filled gaps in the literature with archival research. Now, in partnership with the Harvard Office of Undergraduate Research and Fellowships and their Summer Humanities and Arts Research Program (SHARP), we are looking forward to a new cohort…
Romance gone bad
The Historical Sheet Music Collections have plenty of love songs – songs about flirting, courtship and weddings. But there are also songwriters who understand the opposite end of the romance spectrum, from the perspectives of the ones done wrong. Here are six amusing examples just in time for Valentine’s Day. Never introduce your bloke, to…
“A New Standard of Laziness”
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items recently cataloged from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Tuli Kupferberg’s 1001 Ways to Live Without Working is a handbook, political satire, and collage all-in-one. Nestled between the actual 1005 point list are newspaper advertisements, photographs of protest, slave sale notices, and other pieces of…
Tickets on the Royal Dime
Houghton’s latest exhibition, Shakespeare: His Collected Works, marks the 400th anniversary of the playwright’s death. Here is a closer look at one object on display. Actress and royal mistress Nell Gwyn began her career in the theatre selling oranges for sixpence. By 1676 she had retired from the stage and born Charles II two sons, yet she…
African American composers and performers: portrait images in sheet music
In honor of Black History Month, here are some pieces from the Historical Sheet Music Collections of 19th and 20th century music celebrating the work of Harry Davis, Bob Cole, J. Rosamond Johnson, Jerry Mills and Lottie Grady. Images of African American composers and performers in 18th, 19th and early 20th century sheet music were…
Images of the grotesque
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items recently cataloged from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. The Gypsy’s first issue was published in London in 1915 and contained short stories, essays, poems, illustrations, sonnets, and prose. In their foreword the editors of the magazine acknowledged that many people would criticize their endeavor in…
New on OASIS in February
Finding aids for six newly cataloged collections, including playbills from London theaters, costume designs, and samples of the work of photographic studios, have been added to the OASIS database this month: Processed by: Micah Hoggatt and Susan Pyzynski Playbills and Programs from London Theaters (TCS 63) Processed by: Irina Klyagin Letters to Natasha Trouhanova (MS Thr…
Perhaps Silence Is More Decent: Thomas Merton at 100
January 31st marks the closing of the centenary of Thomas Merton’s birth. Merton is best known for his 1948 autobiography The Seven Story Mountain, which charted his trajectory from world citizen and aspiring literati to cloistered monk at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky. In addition to writing prose and poetry related…
“50 Centuries of Service to Mankind”
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items recently cataloged from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. A History of Pharmacy in Pictures, a depiction of the history of the pharmaceutical profession through oil paintings, was first conceived by pharmacist and journalist George A. Bender before the Second World War. He was inspired…