Houghton Library Blog

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.
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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 →

Congratulations to Harvard’s Stephen Greenblatt, Cogan University Professor of the Humanities, for winning this year’s National Book Award for non-fiction for his book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. The Swerve concerns the rediscovery of the philosophical poem De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), written in the first century BC by Titus Lucretius Carus, but lost to scholarship until a manuscript text was uncovered in 1417. Houghton holds more than 75 different editions of this work; let’s take this opportunity to look at some of the most interesting ones.
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Finding aids for 8 newly cataloged collections have been added to the OASIS database this month, including photos and letters of the actors Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree and Lady Maud Tree, and letters to Harvard President Joseph Willard from his sons. Keep reading →

[Thanks to Micah Hoggatt, Reference Assistant, for contributing this post.]

Once a year at Halloween we surround ourselves with horror and fright for a day. From 1897 to 1962, terror was enjoyed regularly in Montmartre. Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol may have inhabited a former church (retaining the confessional seating and carved, suspended angels), but it offered a decidedly profane fare. A typical night’s entertainment consisted of several short pieces, alternating vivid, naturalistic horror stories with sex farces and other comedies in a format known as douche écossaise. Programs and photographs in the Harvard Theatre Collection give a taste of this theatrical “hot and cold shower.”
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[Thanks to William Stoneman, Florence Fearrington Librarian of Houghton Library, for contributing this post.]

I am pleased to announce a major acquisition of a collection of sixteenth-century annotated books from the English bookseller Roger Gaskell. Ann M. Blair, Henry Charles Lea Professor of History and Harvard College Professor, encouraged this acquisition. She is the author of Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (Yale University Press, 2010). Professor Blair writes:

I am thrilled about the opportunities afforded by this new acquisition of annotated books. Each of these 18 volumes offers unique insight into the reading and thinking of early modern Europeans across an unusually broad range of genres—including classical and school texts, medical and scientific works, but also collections of letters and vernacular works which were less often annotated. I am eager to make use of them in my research and in my courses in book history where students are often interested in how a text was read in its time—annotations like these offer some of the best evidence there is for recovering mentalities of the past.

The collection of 30 editions in 18 volumes includes a wide variety of texts, including school texts of Cicero and Juvenal, Greek texts of Aristotle and Hesiod, and scientific and medical texts by authors such as Euclid, Galen and Celsus. The collection also includes texts which are not frequently found in annotated copies, such as Sebastian Brandt’s Ship of Fools and the letters of Konrad Gesner. A pdf of the collection is available here, but be warned it is extensively illustrated and in color and so does take some time to download.

[Thanks to Emilie Hardman, Public Services/Metadata Assistant, for contributing this post]

Newly digitized items at Houghton include a significant array of material from manuscript collections, such as the Robert Gould Shaw papers, Mary Moody Emerson’s Almanac, the letters of Christophe Daniel Ebeling letters to William Bentley, research materials from the Charles S. Peirce collection, charmingly illustrated letters to Pauline Viardot-Garcia, a leaf of the Dante Rossetti manuscript buried with Elizabeth Siddall, and a translation into Sanskrit of Don Quixote. An example of Jesuit printing in 17th century China, a catalog describing the curious library of Regency miniaturist Richard Cosway, a late 19th century “reductio ad absurdam” [sic] literary journal, and other engaging printed works are also now represented in digital form.
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[Thanks to Christina Davis, Curator of the Woodberry Poetry Room, for contributing this post.]

On the occasion of our 80th anniversary, the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard University is proud to announce the creation of a new website that offers scholars and poetry-readers worldwide the opportunity to encounter rare and heretofore inaccessible recordings from its historic archive.
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