An exciting array of materials have recently been digitized at Houghton. They include manuscript material from Joanna Baillie, George Eliot, John Keats, Charles Lamb, Percy Shelley, Robert Southey, Alfred Tennyson, Hester Thrale and George Washington. A 15th century breviary and Belgian incunable, multiple musical scores, cartoons, broadsides and more may also be viewed fully online.
Inc 9380.5 (32.3), c5
One thinks of Houghton Library as a repository of the very old and the very special but it is also — in its association with Harvard Review — a publisher of the very new. For more than a decade, Houghton has been the home of Harvard’s only professional literary journal, publishing the likes of Seamus Heaney and Joyce Carol Oates, as well as rising stars like Nam Le or the recent Pulitzer Prize-winner Paul Harding.
One of the ways that unknown writers — the Paul Hardings of tomorrow — find their way to Harvard Review is by sending their stories and poems to us in the mail. So while in the rest of Houghton Library mail may be a largely archival matter, at Harvard Review it’s pretty much what we do.
We get a bin full of mail every day: catalogs and press releases and books for review and, above all, unsolicited submissions.
Each year, Houghton awards visiting fellowships to support scholars whose research requires the use of Houghton collections. We are pleased to announce the awarding of 21 fellowships for the 2012-13 fiscal year:
Keep reading →
![Prouisio[n]es cedulas instruciones desu Magestad, 1563. LMC5 N4205 563p](http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/houghton/files/2012/03/LMC5-N4205-563p.jpg)
The Houghton Library recently digitized several books to be added to the digital library Los Primeros Libros de las Américas: A Digital Library of 16th Century Colonial Mexican Imprints. Starting in 1539 with the first book of the Americas, Breve y mas compediosa doctrina Cristiana en lengua Mexicana y castellana (of which no copies survive), Mexico had rich one hundred year printing history before the first book was printed in Colonial America. Based at Texas A&M University and with the collaboration of several Mexican and Texas libraries, the digital library aims to make more accessible these early printings of the New World.
Houghton contributions to the Primeros Libros digital library include:
Keep reading →
Bunny Ware. MS Thr 824 (15).
What makes a good burlesque striptease dancer? As former performer Jane Woods aka “Shawna St. Clair” from the Golden Days of Burlesque Historical Society would say one who “…learned the art of removing her costume, inch by inch, slowly and sensuously, with smoothness and grace. She never lost the beat of the music, nor forgot for a moment that she must appear seductive and completely feminine from every angle, to every viewer’s eye.” Clearly the lovely Bunny Ware who is pictured understood the every angle idea. What is often forgotten is that early burlesque in America had little to do with striptease, it was a mixture of circus and minstrel shows combined with a little bit of dance hall. This gradually changed as American burlesque evolved from bawdy songs with a flash of ruffled drawers to a more scandalous G-string and pasties. Keep reading →
A new acquisition in in the Early Modern Books and Manuscripts Department shows the inner workings of what one might think of as the 18th century precursor to Craigslist: the Universal Register Office. The Office was founded in 1751 by Sir John Fielding, the blind magistrate who played a crucial role in creating London’s first professional police force, the Bow Street Runners, and his half-brother Henry Fielding, the prolific writer best known as the author of Tom Jones, and Sir John’s predecessor as Chief Magistrate.
The purpose of the Universal Register Office was to act as clearinghouse for many of the functions that would later be served by newspaper classified ads: listings of places for rent, job placement, auction listings, and facilitating connections between wholesalers and retailers. Its existence is a reflection of the difficulties at that time of transactions which we take for granted in the information era.
Keep reading →
One hundred years ago this week, Harry Elkins Widener, Harvard class of 1907, wrote this letter to his friend and advisor Luther Livingston. He begins: “Just a few lines to tell you I am about make a quick trip to England. We sail on Wednesday at 1 a.m. on the Mauretania and return on April 10th on the maiden voyage of the Titanic.” Tragically, Widener did not make it home as planned, one of the many who died when the Titanic sank on April 12th, 1912.
We are pleased to report that the March-April issue of Harvard Magazine draws on two articles recently published in the Harvard Library Bulletin.
The Treasure column, “Orderly Living,” draws on Professor Jeffrey Hamburger’s study of Houghton Library MS Typ 590 in HLB 21:1-2 (2010, published in July 2011). Hamburger’s essay on a previously unpublished Regimen mensis or regime of the months, a miniature medical manual offering advice over the course of the calendar, examines a manuscript whose interest is as much textual as it is visual. The Latin hexameters that provide the backbone of this text turn out to be linked to an early vernacular medical regime. The calendar is illustrated, as was often the case with such monthly regimes, with small circles illustrating the signs of the Zodiac against vibrant red and blue backgrounds. This double issue of the Harvard Library Bulletin, edited by Hamburger, is entitled “Piecing Together the Picture: Fragments of German and Netherland Manuscripts in Houghton Library” and reports on the work of an international group of scholars and their efforts to link material in Houghton Library with related manuscripts in other collections.
The College Pump column, “Cold Meets Flame,” draws on Paul M. Wright’s work on a little known portrait by Kahlil Gibran of Harvard President Charles W. Eliot in HLB 21: 3 (2010, published in June 2011). While trying to establish himself as a designer, illustrator, painter, and poet, the twenty-seven-year-old Gibran conceived of several series of portraits of “great men.” His request to draw the seventy-six-year-old and recently retired president of Harvard was not surprising: after his forty-year tenure as president, Eliot was the most famous educator of his era, having created the modern Harvard and, by extension, a model for the modern research university. The resulting portrait was published for the first time in this issue of HLB.
[Thanks to William Stoneman, Florence Fearrington Librarian of Houghton Library, for contributing this post.]
The John Milton and Ruth Neils Ward Collection of the Harvard Theatre Collection is comprised of thousands of books, scores, librettos, playbills, illustrations, and ephemera relating to public performances that incorporate music in an essential way, such as ballet, opera, social dance, pantomime, operetta, and burlesque.
The letters in the collection offer a particularly quotidian perspective on the performing arts as occupation and trade, and on performing artists as real people preoccupied with such universal human concerns as going to war, planning for the future, and attempting to resolve workplace disputes.
Keep reading →
Finding aids for 11 newly cataloged collections, and preliminary box lists for two recent acquisitions have been added to the OASIS database this month, including TV and movie stills, scores from Hasty Pudding Club productions, Gilbert & Sullivan correspondence, and more.
Keep reading →
