Houghton Library Blog

[This post adapted from Kenneth Carpenter's Reader's Choice exhibition in the Houghton Library ]

The largest component of Houghton Library’s notable bookplate collection was the gift of Winward Prescott, class of 1909. Prescott’s interest in bookplates was clearly lifelong, for as early as 1914 he published a bibliography of bookplate literature, which he revised and republished in 1926.

Bookplates are an art form, and Prescott collected many because of their artistic merit; but he was also catholic in his collecting. He gathered the bookplates of both individuals and institutions. American and British bookplates predominate, but numerous Continental bookplates are also in the collection. Along with boxes devoted to bookplates of individuals and others to bookplates of institutional libraries, many of the bookplates are bound in volumes, arranged by type of institution or by locality. Some of these are entirely the creation of Prescott; others are interleaved volumes of published works in which Prescott has inserted other bookplates as supplementary illustrations. Sections within Prescott’s collection include: College bookplates; College Label Ex Libris; A.W. Pope, Some Remarks on Some Masonic Bookplates, extra-illustrated; Medical Bookplates; Library Interior Bookplates (mostly foreign); Public Library Bookplates; Public Library Labels; Canadian bookplates; Clubs, including student clubs; Special Libraries; and many more.

Bookplates clearly provide insight into an individual and into that person’s relationship with books–and into cultural pattern in different eras. Thus, an hypothesis is that nineteenth-century individuals who used books as tools had quite simple bookplates, in contrast to bibliographic collectors. The iconography of American institutional bookplates is another aspect of them that may be revealing to cultural historians. To consider such matters, one needs a collection, which in quantity goes well beyond the bookplate illustrations available in published volumes. The Prescott collection provides sufficient examples for study.

Individual bookplates also have their own interests. They can sometimes demonstrate the existence of an institution that has hitherto been unrecorded. Experience has shown this to be particularly the case with circulating libraries, which by their nature are dependent of an individual, and are thus ephemeral. Bookplates sometimes print rules of the institution, or even give historical information. A few show what the library looked like.

In addition to its research value, Houghton readers and staff may find in the bookplate collection illustrative materials for exhibitions and publications. It should also be noted that the Houghton Library has a provenance file (also Part II,Part III, Part IV) that records the existence of bookplates in books, thus helping to date the bookplate, something that, alas, a collection of bookplates alone does not do.

Kenneth Carpenter, Independent Scholar
Librarian at Harvard University, 1968-2000

Picturing Prayer: Books of Hours in Houghton Library, Harvard University is a new website devoted to examples of this prevalent form of the medieval book. The site examines the various parts of a typical book of hours, and provides ten examples from Houghton collections, digitized in high resolution from cover to cover, utilizing page-turning software. A third section enables the reader to make a side-by-side comparison of the same feature, such as the Office of the Dead, in each manuscript in which it appears.

Originating in a 2006 exhibition, the project was overseen by William Stoneman of Houghton Library and Professor Jeffrey Hamburger, with assistance from the Library Instructional Technology Fellows program.

Houghton Library MS Richardson 42 (12r)

Our newest online exhibition examines two crucial figures in the history of the Harvard College Library, Harry Elkins Widener, and his mother Eleanor, who gave Harvard both Harry’s outstanding collection of books and manuscripts, and the library that memorializes him.

Cataloging has recently been completed on the Harvard Theatre Collection’s Tennessee Williams Additional Papers, 1946-1983, ( MS Thr 550.) Details can be found in the finding aid created by senior manuscripts cataloger Bonnie B. Salt.

These papers join a wealth of Tennessee Williams material at the Houghton Library and the Harvard Theatre Collection, most notably the Tennessee Williams papers, 1932-1983 (MS Thr 397.)

In honor of Samuel Johnson’s 300th birthday, Houghton is presenting an exhibition of the Donald & Mary Hyde Collection of Dr. Samuel Johnson for the first time since its arrival at Houghton in 2004. The exhibition will be on display in Houghton’s Edison & Newman Room through November 14th, and is accompanied by an online version of the exhibition. A published catalog will be available from Harvard University Press in 2009.

Houghton’s Technical Services Department today announced that it had added its 2000th finding aid to the OASIS database, Harvard’s online catalog of archival and manuscript collections. The Mary M. Engel collection of “filleuls de guerre” letters is a collection of letters from World War I soldiers to their “godmother” and pen pal, Mary Engel. For more information, see the article at HCL News.

“Public Poet, Private Man: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at 200″ has won the 2009 Leab Award for Best Online Exhibition from the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries. All of us at Houghton extend our congratulations to the Modern Books and Manuscripts Department, guest exhibition curator Christoph Irmscher, and the web design team in the Harvard College Library Communications Office.

Cataloging is now complete on our collection of the papers of the influential thinker and Harvard philosophy professor Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000). At over 80 boxes, there is a wealth of information on Quine’s life and work. I might stop by to have a look at Series IIE, “Crank letters sent to Quine” (his categorization, not ours).

There’s a capsule biography of Quine in the finding aid, but for more information, see the very detailed web page organized by his son.

He may be best known as a creator of modern detective fiction, but there is more to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle than Sherlock Holmes. A new exhibition, “Ever Westward’: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in American Culture,” which opened May 5 at Houghton Library, hopes to paint a fuller picture of Doyle’s contributions to world literature, which range from historical fiction to personal memoir to science fiction and beyond.

via Doyle’s Literary Legacy Explored – HCL News – Harvard College Library.

From Thursday, May 7 to Saturday, May 9, Houghton will also be hosting a symposium, “Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: A Sesquicentennial Assessment,” which aims, among other things, to broaden understanding of Doyle, examine canonical and non-canonical writings, and to witness Doyle’s literary legacy.

We’ve just updated the page for our upcoming symposium Johnson At 300 with the registration form, schedule of events, and hotel information. We’ve got an outstanding lineup of participants, and of course we’ll be opening the first exhibition of the Hyde Collection since it arrived at Houghton. I hope you can join us.

via Hyde Collection Catablog.