Last month Houghton Library acquired a small group of letters and postcards from Charles Ricketts (1866-1931) & Charles Shannon (1863-1937) to the Irish artist and collector Cecil French (1879-1953). These letters were acquired with the Louis Appell Jr. Fund for British Civilization because they are full of current affairs, news and gossip in the world [...]
Houghton Library recently acquired two autograph letters written by William Morris (1834-1896) the English designer, author, visionary socialist and proprietor of the Kelmscott Press. These letters are especially appealing because they are both hitherto unknown and unpublished, and addressed to an individual not known to have corresponded with Morris until these letters surfaced at auction [...]
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 [...]
The Shakespeare authorship question, now over 160 years old, continues to generate books, conferences, lectures, debates, films, websites, and even blog posts; a lot of people continue to doubt that William Shakespeare the actor actually wrote the plays attributed to him. The controversy itself has become a worthy subject of study, interesting for its longevity, [...]
John M. Ward, recently deceased William Powell Mason Professor of Music emeritus at Harvard University, was fascinated by the business side of music, particularly the relationship between composers and publishers. In the course of pursuing this fascination, he had the opportunity to purchase a large collection of business-related correspondence assembled by Albi Rosenthal, English antiquarian [...]
In a noticeably hurried hand, George Bernard Shaw dashed off a letter to famed actress Ellen Terry. He was sending along the last proofs of his play Mrs. Warren’s Profession for her opinion. “The post is just going,” he wrote, “and there is no further communication with this place for 48 hours.” Having had time [...]
Removed from Houghton’s copy of Sir William Edward Parry’s Journal of a Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific Performed in the Years 1819-20 is a clutch of letters and other papers tracing differing methods of polar exploration in the nineteenth century. First, a note from Sir George [...]
“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 [...]
The process of campaigning for the position of U.S. president can be an arduous one. For Theodore Roosevelt, the 1912 presidential campaign very nearly turned deadly. TR had already served two presidential terms, from 1901-1908. Despite claiming he would never again seek that office, TR was not terribly eager to retire from public life. His [...]
In this week’s mail bag, a touch of levity and an epic scandal. A letter to American raconteur Alexander Woollcott from British author Marie Belloc Lowndes dated April 28, 1937, begins, “Dearest Alec, Here are two little news stories of those royal children.” I wish I’d come across this letter back in June during the [...]
