This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items recently cataloged from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. The arrival of the Beat Generation generated controversy, conversation, and in some cases literature; for some onlookers, though, it was mostly a source of opportunity. Hence Beatnik, which promises “an uncensored, unexpurgated exposé of the ‘Beat Generation’”,…
The Bon Ton Skillig List
Here is a recently cataloged “Skellig list” broadside from the city of Cork, Ireland. A Skellig (or Skillig) list is a poem pairing up local bachelors and unmarried women, giving the subjects false names; but they were easily identifiable to local residents, given their age and physical descriptions (flattering or insulting), how long they have…
Ginsberg for sale
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring material from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. The Beats continue their expansion onto Houghton’s shelves by means of Santo Domingo Collection accessioning; Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) is the most recent author to attain fuller representation in our catalog. Ginsberg books in the collection range from the slightest volume…
Crowley and the Beast
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. The Santo Domingo Collection continues to bolster Harvard’s library of works by author and occult leader Aleister Crowley. These range from substantive books on magic to pamphlets containing individual poems (one of these, titled “Tyrol”, is a condemnation of…
Happy Birthday, Emily Dickinson Archive!
Launched on October 23, 2013, the Emily Dickinson Archive (EDA) celebrates its first year of operation this week, during Open Access Week. The site received 1.2 million “hits” from poetry lovers in its first 10 days; after a year, monthly usage averages 10,000 visits and 377,000 page views per month. About 80% of visitors are…
A poet, killer, thief, brawler, and vagabond…
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Francois Villon was all of those things, and most prominently a subversive outsider. At a time when most poetic works were strongly religious or allegorical Villon wrote with honesty about love and sex, drinking, money problems, and…
Where’s Waldo?
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) and Daniel Chester French, (1850-1931) Ralph Waldo Emerson sits silently as a dark bronze statue, watching young Harvard scholars travel in and out of their classrooms. He sits majestically as a marble sculpture, overseeing readers at the Concord Free Public Library. He sits coyly as a forest sprite, in a corner…
A sumptuous edition of Pierre Louÿs’s unpublished poems
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. A particularly sumptuous volume from the collection of Gérard Nordmann is today’s Santo Domingo Collection feature. This 1938 publication of Poèmes inédits (Unpublished poems) by Pierre Louÿs was limited to 109 numbered copies; this is copy 5. Louÿs…