This post is part of an ongoing series featuring material from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Henri Austruy, born in 1871, was an attorney and editor of the journal La nouvelle revue from 1913 to 1940, when occupying Nazi forces shut the journal down. 1940 is also the approximate date of Austruy’s unrecorded death, which may…
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…
Burroughs in pulp
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo collection. William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) looms large among countercultural figures of 20th-century literature. The seminal Naked lunch is a famous source of controversy – it was banned in Boston in 1962, and ultimately redeemed in a 1966 obscenity trial before…
Lasciviousness, libel, and letters
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. As the French Revolution erupted in 1789, the bourgeoisie took up a variety of arms against the aristocracy; among them was literature. Pictured here from the Santo Domingo Collection is La Messaline françoise, a libelous account, published under…
The Jimi Hendrix Bibliographic Experience
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. This week’s feature is the second of two sculptural volumes: in this case, the binding itself, rather than the enclosure, defies convention. The book, a paperback French biography of Jimi Hendrix published in 1976, is unremarkable in itself. However,…
Cork, resin, and rope
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. In the course of these posts on the Santo Domingo Collection, numerous fine, extravagant, and perhaps even ostentatious bindings and enclosures have been showcased. This week, we bring you the first of two books that extend past the codex…
Advice for Young Women
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Written in 1938, Bell Wood-Comstock’s Plain Facts for Young Women on Marijuana, Narcotics, Liquor and Tobacco offers advice for those ladies whose goal is to get married and settle down with children. Wood-Comstock wrote several books on advice…
A warning from the High Priestess of Oom
Alma Hirsig’s My Life in a Love Cult….
The “Lady Adventurer”
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Grace Thompson Seton was many things, a feminist, a suffragette, a poet, a mother, a designer, a crack shot, and most relevant to this post a travel writer. She was married to Ernest Thompson Seton who…
Unmodified sexuality
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. We return to the occult in this week’s feature from the Santo Domingo Collection. Today’s author is Austin Osman Spare, an English artist, writer, and occultist active in the first half of the twentieth century. While Spare’s finely-wrought…