The present book is a copy of the fifth edition of Country By-Ways (Typ 870.87.4665) a collection of stories about life and nature in Maine, written by Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909). Its green and brown cloth cover, for the dominant colors of Maine in Jewett’s sketches, was designed by Sarah Wyman Whitman, a close friend [...]
Houghton Library holds the largest collection anywhere of original works by the English author and artist Edward Lear (1812-1888). For the past two years the library has been engaged in a project to digitize all this material. The first phase of the endeavor included Lear’s natural history drawings, which were also the subject of an [...]
The Department of Printing and Graphic Arts recently acquired this hollow-cut silhouette in an oval shape of approximately 3½ x 5”. The inscription below the silhouette identifies the maker as “Williams,” referring to one of the few African-American silhouettists known of the nineteenth century, Moses Williams (1777-ca.1825). An inscription in the same hand on the [...]
On Wednesday April 10th, Nick Wilding, Assistant Professor in Early Modern History at Georgia State University, will give the 97th George Parker Winship Lecture. “Forging the Moon: or, How to Spot a Fake Galileo” will discuss a copy of Galileo’s landmark Sidereus Nuncius, claimed to hold Galileo’s hand-drawn images of the moon observed through a [...]
Eleanor M. Garvey, retired Curator of Printing and Graphic Arts, Houghton Library, passed away February 11, 2013, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her many friends and acquaintances will miss her warmth, vivacity, generosity of spirit, and gift for friendship. Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, Elli Garvey attended local schools, graduated from Wellesley College, Class of 1940, and earned [...]
Shortly after March 12, 1872, the architect Henry Hobson Richardson (1838-1886) received a letter, signed by George Minot Dexter and Charles Henry Parker on behalf of the Building Committee, inviting him to enter a competition to design a new church building for Trinity Church in Boston. Though terse and factual in formulation, the letter led [...]
Finding aids for 8 newly cataloged collections, and a preliminary box list for one recent acquisition, have been added to the OASIS database this month, including Aubrey Beardsley illustrations, a major addition to our Johnny Green collection, and letters of Edwin Booth. Processed by Michael W. Austin: Johnny Green Additional Papers, 1880-1989 (MS [...]
“I am having a great time down hear in the city” -Joe Last week’s Superstorm Sandy has the New York metropolitan region on the minds and in the hearts of many these days. Thus, a little trip down memory lane to times that – at least on the surface – appeared rosier. Houghton has in [...]
[Thanks to Matthew Battles, Senior Researcher at metaLAB, for contributing this post on the new Edward Lear Visualizer.] I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but let me just get this out: a library is no mere set of bookshelves, no simple windowpane through which to view the wonders of books and the discoveries [...]
On September 8, 1827, the French printer-lithographer J. Cluis wrote to the members of the jury for the Exhibition of Industrial Products (“Exposition des produits de l’Industrie”) to present his invention of “autography” (“autographie”). Little is known about Cluis except that he was active as a printer-lithographer from the 1820s to the 1840s in Paris, [...]
