Houghton Library Blog

The curious discovery was related by Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) to Jan Ingenhousz (1730-1799) in this week’s letter, which is from Houghton’s Autograph File. Ingenhousz was physician to the court of Austria at the time, and a fellow of the Royal Society who later settled in England.  Franklin was in London for his extended second trip to Britain, and had just over a month before been taken to task by the privy council over what they deemed treasonable activities. Keep reading →

  

Realia for magic and jokes, 1957-2001. MS Thr 772 (16).

These “heavenly scented” towelettes are just one example of recently cataloged objects found in the Fredric Woodbridge Wilson Collection of Theater, Dance, and Music in the Harvard Theatre Collection.  In addition to hot pepper candy and a rubber pencil other examples include Keep reading →

[Thanks to Ward Project Music Cataloger Andrea Cawelti for contributing this post]

You know your Friday afternoon is looking up when you open a 19th century dance treatise and stumble across the phrase “first, give all the ladies a vegetable….”

An early donation by the late John Milton Ward, Charles Périn’s wonderful guide to the Cotillion (or German Dance) provides an overview of many versions which were fashionable in France ca. 1876, complete with illustrations and appropriate music. Everything, in fact, that an aspiring French hostess would need to plan a fabulous ball.
Keep reading →

A curiosity in life, Chang Bunker (1811-1874) and Eng Bunker (1811-1874), the famous conjoined twins, leave us with this most curious thank you note.

The experience of cataloging this letter led to some interesting observations. Chang and Eng spent every moment of their lives together but there is some evidence that they did try to live distinctly different lives.
Keep reading →

The Harvard Theatre Collection is currently in the midst of a multi-year project to catalog and digitize the Angus McBean Collection of theatrical photographs. The collection consists of over 30,000 glass plate negatives and their accompanying contact proofs.

Angus McBean was born in 1904 in Newport, South Wales, England. As a youth he was a devotee of the cinema, spending hours watching the early silent films and experimenting with photography. After a brief attempt at a career in banking, he moved to London in 1924 to work as a restorer of antiques, at the same time continuing his “hobbies” of mask-making and photography. In the early 1930s he received his first theatrical commission to make masks for The Golden Toy being performed at the Coliseum.
Keep reading →

As a young man of 26, printer Alfred North was so full of passions, doubts and pronouncements of great surety that, though his pen yielded constrained, constant little lines, his thoughts could hardly be whittled into expression, even through the long, looping sentences that filled page upon page of his correspondence.  This was especially true of the letter he sent to Reverend Dr. Wisner, Secretary to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), upon the notably hesitant offer of a post as printer to the Singaporean mission extended to him in 1834.

Keep reading →

This posting inaugurates a new weekly feature on the Houghton Library blog, “You’ve Got Mail,” based on letters in Houghton Library. Every Friday this year a Houghton staff member will select a letter from the diverse collections in the Library and put that letter into context. It is our hope that this feature will introduce you to the amazing variety of correspondence included in our collections and the topics, mundane and momentous, personal and universal, they explore.

On 8 October 1779 the diarist and writer Hester Thrale (1741-1821) and her husband were traveling, and her friend Samuel Johnson was worried at not having heard from her. Johnson (1709-1784), poet, essayist, critic and lexicographer, was one of the great letter writers of the English language. He wrote:

I begin to be frighted at your omission to write, do not torture me any longer, but let me know where you are, how you got thither, how you live there and everything else, that one friend loves to know of another.

I will show you the way.

Johnson, who suffered from gout, then proceeds to describe his week and his health and jokingly concludes:

This, madam, is the history of one of my toes; the history of my head would perhaps be much shorter.

This letter is MS Hyde 1 (93). Houghton Library, thanks to the generous bequest of Mary Hyde Eccles, includes more than half of the surviving letters written by Samuel Johnson. The Hyde Collection also holds letters from other members of Johnson’s circle including Hester Thrale, James Boswell, Joshua Reynolds and David Garrick. This letter has been edited and annotated by Bruce Redford in the Hyde edition of The Letters of Samuel Johnson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992-1994, III, 186-187.

[Thanks to William Stoneman, Florence Fearrington Librarian of Houghton Library, for contributing this post.]

Finding aids for 15 newly cataloged collections, and preliminary box lists for four recent acquisitions, have been added to the OASIS database this month, including Gilbert & Sullivan cigarette cards, human curiosities prints, and more.
Keep reading →

Who was La Jaguarina?  Born Ella Hattan in 1859 in Zanesville, Ohio she was originally a professional actress that performed with theater greats Edwin Booth and Dion Boucicault.  Oddly enough she also trained in fencing and sword play with Colonel Thomas Hoyer Monstery, a 19^th century Danish-American mercenary, duelist,  and fencing and boxing instructor.  After years of training with Monstery, Hattan fully assumed this persona of “La Jaguarina” complete with a fake history of life in Europe with an English father and Spanish mother.  “La Jaguarina, Champion Amazon of the Age” fought men in various types of sword play contests. Keep reading →

Finding aids for 16 newly cataloged collections have been added to the OASIS database this month, including Parisian ephemera, Gilbert & Sullivan sheet music, and more. Keep reading →