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…
Books in Books
Books on Books: Reflections on Reading and Writing in the Middle Ages is a new online exhibition that features medieval images of books in the process of being made, presented, exchanged, written or read. A joint project of the Houghton Library and Jeffrey Hamburger, Kuno Francke Professor of German Art & Culture, and Chair, Medieval…
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…
Houghton Visiting Fellowship Recipients, 2010-11
Each year, Houghton awards visiting fellowships to support scholars whose research requires the use of Houghton collections. We are pleased to announce the awarding of 26 fellowships for the 2010-11 fiscal year: [UPDATE: See the HCL News article on the Houghton fellowships.]…
Ward Collection gets a Second Life
To Move in Measure Jack & Elaine Whitehorn Memorial Library, Caledon Victoria City, Second Life Ward cataloger Andrea Cawelti provides a glimpse into the social dance world of the 19th century, under her Second Life nom de plume Leslie Weston. Using primary sources from the John Milton and Ruth Neils Ward Collection at Houghton Library,…
Harvard’s Lincoln
Houghton’s newest online exhibition is Harvard’s Lincoln, which features selections from its extensive Abraham Lincoln collection. The exhibition was originally mounted in 2009, in celebration of the bicentenary of Lincoln’s birth. The collection was built primarily by two significant donations in the early decades of the twentieth century: the Alonzo Rothschild collection in 1916 and…
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…
Thomas Hollis
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…