Modern Books and Manuscripts

In celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892), a new exhibition focuses on the poet’s great Arthuriad, Idylls of the King, a twelve-part cycle of poems composed and published over the course of nearly thirty years. The exhibition includes early manuscript drafts and variants, published editions, and artists’ interpretations of the Idylls.

The exhibition is free and open to the public.  More information can be found on Houghton’s website.

For details, contact exhibition curator Heather Cole, 617-495-2449.

Image:  Tennyson from the Houghton Library Portrait File.  May not be reproduced without permission.

Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003), novelist, literary theorist, philosopher, and journalist -  though a reclusive figure in the literary world - had a profound impact on twentieth-century thinkers such as George Bataille, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, among others.  A recent acquisition by the Library, a joint purchase by Modern Books and Manuscripts, the French, Italian, and Scandinavian Collections of Widener Library, and an anonymous donor, will help shed new light on this elusive figure.

Continue Reading »

In 1861, President Lincoln  signed a bill making the United States Sanitary Commission into a government agency. Organized by thousands of women volunteers across the country, the commission succeeded in raising almost twenty five million dollars  during the course of the Civil War, and worked to cut the disease rate of the Union Army in half.*

In early 1864, the USSC held a “Sanitary Fair” in Brooklyn and Long Island to raise money for their efforts. The group published a daily newspaper titled The Drum Beat from 22 February to 5 March, with an extra issue on 11 March 1864.  The paper was professionally edited, illustrated, and printed, included work by leading writers and artists, and sold nearly 6000 copies per day at the fair and by subscription.  While an interesting example of a Civil War publication in its own right, the newspaper holds special significance for our collection at Houghton. Continue Reading »

At the turn of the twentieth century, Spanish publishers the Maucci brothers commissioned Mexican artist José Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913) to illustrate a new series of children’s stories on the history of Mexico, the Biblioteca del niño mexicano.  Each story was published with a colorful, and often rather gruesome, wrapper illustration depicting the contents within, and several black-and-white illustrations within the text.  One of the first attempts to bring history to Mexican children, the stories were sixteen pages each, and were bound together, at about the same time, in thematic groups of about twelve.

Houghton Library, with funding from Widener Library’s program on Latin America, Spain and Portugal, has recently acquired a set of 85 of these stories, bound in seven volumes.  Three of Posada’s covers can be seen here:

More of Posada’s covers for the series can be seen here, from a collection at the University of Hawaii Library.

*2008-2071.  Purchased with the Andrew Preston Peabody Fund.  Images may not be reproduced without permission.  To request an image of this item, or any items displayed on this blog, please contact the Houghton Library Public Services department,  houghref at fas.harvard.edu.

While best known as a Romantic poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) held government posts in the British government of Malta from April 1804 to September 1805.  The location was chosen in part to aid the poet’s poor health.

From April 1804 to September 1805, Coleridge served in Malta as Secretary to the Governor, Sir Alexander Ball.  Coleridge enjoyed his work, practicing his Italian (the official language used in the Maltese government) as he signed himself “Segretario Pubblico dell’ Isole di Malta, Gozo, e delle loro dipendenze” many times each day.  Ball was a popular figure, and Coleridge later described him as a “truly great man.” Privately, however, Coleridge was unhappy in Malta, and was frequently ill.

Hostility towards the Maltese Jewish population was increasing in the Spring of 1805.  On May 22, Coleridge wrote two official notices for the Governor; the first condemned the “popular prejudice” against the Jews, and the second alerted its readers that three people will be whipped and exiled for inventing and spreading false rumors, and advised those who would commit similar offenses that they will be treated the same way.

This kind of Coleridge ephemera is rather rare, and is an exciting addition to Houghton’s extensive holdings of Coleridge material, which include books from the poet’s library, Coleridge’s own publications, and manuscript collections of compositions and correspondence, all of which can be viewed by searching Hollis.

*2008-2030.  Houghton Library, Harvard University.  Image may not be reproduced without permission.

German-born Winfried Georg Sebald (1944-2001) is widely known in the German-speaking world for his visionary novels, collections of poetry, and astute literary criticism.

Sebald’s award-winning fiction includes the novels Schwindel, Gefühle (Vertigo)(1990), Die Ausgewanderten (The Emigrants) (1992),  Die Ringe des Saturn: Eine Englische Wallfahrt (The Rings of Saturn) (1995), and Austerlitz (2001), among others, focus on themes of European history, the collective memory of the postwar generation, and the chaos of the modern world.  The novels are not entirely fiction, and have been described as part memoir, part travelogue.  Sebald’s work is frequently illustrated by uncaptioned photographs and other images throughout his text, often meant to evoke the indistinct nature of memory.

Houghton has recently acquired a collection of over thirty works by and about Sebald, a gift of Sebald bibliographer Roger Stoddard.  The materials from this accession have been cataloged separately, but may be viewed by searching Hollis.

Much of Sebald’s work has been translated into English by Michael Hulse.  For more Sebald at Houghton, see the Michael Hulse translations of W.G. Sebald papers, MS Eng 1632.

Image above is from the dust jacket of the 2001 Verlag edition of Austerlitz.

The career of John Updike (1932-2009), Harvard ‘54, is well known: more than 50 books of fiction, poetry, short stories, and criticism; two Pulitzer Prizes; four National Book Awards; and a host of other honors. He is, indisputably, one of America’s pre-eminent men of letters. To honor his many contributions to his alma mater, Houghton Library has mounted a small exhibition, John Updike’s Harvard, with items drawn from Updike’s own archive and from other Houghton collections. Included are his yearbook, a Lampoon cover he drew, a short story with comments by his English professor, Albert Guerard, and more.

This exhibition is free and open to the public.

Image, above, John Updike as a Harvard senior, 1954   Image, below, Updike (left) with his staff at the Harvard Lampoon, 1954.    Both images © Harvard Yearbook Publications. Images may not be reproduced without permission.

English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809-1882) is best remembered for his work on the evolution of plants and animals, including his theory of natural selection. 2009 marks not only the bicentennial anniversary of Darwin’s birth, but also the sesquicentennial anniversary of the publication of his most famous work, On the Origin of Species. “There is grandeur in this view of life,” a new exhibition at Houghton, celebrates the two anniversaries.

Origin first appeared in 1859 and went through six heavily revised editions in Darwin’s lifetime. Literary in style, it appealed to readers of all types in its simple explanations and conversational tone. Although Darwin had no knowledge of how variations in species occurred, the work is mainly a demonstration that they do occur. The work stresses a natural, as opposed to a divine, presence in this process, and it provoked intense debate in both the public and private circles of a very religious society. It remains a highly-regarded and popular work of scientific research, and Darwin’s theories are debated just as heavily today as when they were first published.

The exhibition, on display in Houghtons’ Amy Lowell Room, includes a page from Darwin’s original manuscript, correspondence with friend and Harvard professor of zoology and geology Louis Agassiz, the first and several early editions of the book itself, and a few contemporary reactions to Darwin’s theories.

The exhibition is free and open to the public.  More information can be found on Houghton’s website.

For information on Darwin-related events at Harvard, visit the Darwin Day 200 at Harvard website.

Image: Darwin photographed around 1874 by Leonard Darwin.  Portrait File.   May not be reproduced without permission.

The Library’s traditionally strong holdings of texts in English dialects, particularly dialect poetry, have been further enhanced with the acquisition of the James Stevens-Cox Collection of William Barnes of Dorset. Barnes (1801-1886) was one of those remarkable self-educated Victorian polymaths: schoolmaster, clergyman, philologist, artist, and (most importantly) poet.

Born into a farming family of seven children, Barnes was educated at the village school. His excellent handwriting won him his first job as an engrossing clerk at a solicitor’s office at the age of 13, which marked the end of his formal education. However, determined to further educate and better himself, he pursued music, engraving, classical and modern languages, science, archaeology, and a host of other subjects on his own. He was further spurred to better himself when he fell in love with Julia Miles, the daughter of a supervisor of the excise. Barnes began teaching in 1823, and he and Julia were married in 1827. Julia’s organizing ability, combined with Barnes’s scholarly and teaching accomplishments, made their school flourish; and Barnes published on a wide range of topics, from mathematics to philology to local history to, most importantly, poetry.

Barnes secured his reputation as a poet with the publication of Poems in the Dorset dialect (1844). His admirers included Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, Edmund Gosse, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Alfred Tennyson, his Dorset neighbor Thomas Hardy (who edited his Selected Poems) and, in succeeding generations, W.H. Auden, Siegfried Sassoon, and Christopher Ricks. While Barnes did publish poetry in “standard” English, it is his dialect poems that are most admired. As Hardy put it: “…his ingenious internal rhymes, his subtle juxtaposition of kindred lippings and vowel-sounds, show fastidiousness in word-selection that is surprising in verse which professes to represent the habitual modes of language among the western peasantry” (Preface, Selected Poems). Much of his best poetry was inspired by his wife. The poignant “The Wife a-Lost,” written after her death, gives a flavor of his verse, beginning:

Since I noo mwore do zee your feace,
Up steairs or down below,
I’ll zit me in the lwonesome pleace,
Where flat-bough’d beech do grow;
Below the beeches’ bough, my love,
Where you did never come,
An’ I don’t look to meet ye now,
As I do look at hwome.

The Stevens-Cox collection is a near-complete assemblage of Barnes’s scholarly and poetical works, in multiple editions, issues, and binding variants. In addition to Barnes’s published works, it includes some unpublished poems in manuscript, documents, important family letters, proofs of his wood engravings, and photographs, and well as posthumous publications of his poetry. The collection provides the raw materials for a much-needed bibliography of the work of a major, somewhat neglected, nineteenth-century poet.

Manuscripts and images, *2008M-32.  Images may not be reproduced without permission.

Researchers should contact the curator to obtain access. A list of items in the collection may be found here.

By examining a reader’s annotations in the margins of a book, it can be possible to obtain insight into what might have influenced that reader’s own writing.   We recently acquired both a copy of J.W. Mackail’s Latin Literature owned and annotated by T.S. Eliot, as well as Allen Ginsberg’s copy of T.S. Eliot’s Collected Poems, in which Ginsberg extensively annotated “The Waste Land.”

Poet, dramatist, Harvard graduate and Nobel Prize winner T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) began to study Latin while a student at Smith Academy from 1898-1905, and continued to study languages, both modern and ancient, through college.  Eliot probably acquired J.W. Mackail’s Latin Literature while studying at Harvard.  While he made few annotations to the text itself, Eliot also made extensive notes in pencil on several blank pages throughout the book.  Eliot’s bookplate is also pasted inside the front cover (Eliot’s bookplate includes his family’s motto Tace et fac, “be silent and act.”)  Examples of Eliot’s early handwriting are uncommon, and as Eliot made extensive use of his linguistic skills within his poetry, it is always interesting to catch a glimpse into his study of them. (Click on the images to magnify them.)

Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) was one of the most important figures in the Beat movement of the mid-twentieth century.  Two years after graduation from Columbia University, while working in New York as a market researcher, Ginsberg purchased this 1936 edition of Eliot’s Collected Poems 1909-1935, which he signed “Allen Ginsberg / October 1950″ on the front free endpaper.  Ginsberg’s extensive annotations to The Waste Land document his efforts to work through the poem.

Mackail, Latin Literature. New York: Scribners, 1895.  *2008-1002.

Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909-1935. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. [1936]  *AC95.G4351.Zz936e.

Houghton Library, Harvard University.  Images may not be reproduced without permission.

Prince Hall (1738-1807), known as the father of Black Freemasonry in the United States, worked as a minister, abolitionist, civil rights activist, and proponent of education for black children.  Details on Hall’s birth and early life are vague; the first record of Hall reveals he was a servant to William Hall of Boston.  Legally a slave (although not in practice), Hall was freed following the Boston Massacre.  As an adult, Hall became a leader within the African-American community of Boston.  In 1775, Hall and fourteen other black men were initiated into Military Lodge No. 441 in Boston, which was then affiliated with the British Army.  Following the Revolution, facing discrimination, (to be initiated into a Lodge, a Mason needs to gain a unanimous vote, but as votes are contributed anonymously, it would be impossible to identify any one dissenting individual), black Masons began urging Hall to organize a separate lodge.  African Lodge #1 was formed as 1776, and Hall continued as Worshipful Master.  In 1848, African Grand Lodges across the country changed their name to the Prince Hall Grand Lodge.  For more information on Hall, see Prince Hall: Life and Legacy, by Charles H. Wesley (1983).

The W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University has recently given Houghton a Masonic initiation certificate signed by Hall (above).  Dated June 23, 1799, the certificate initiates abolitionist Richard P.G. Wright, and is signed by George Medallion (SW), Jube Hill (JW) and William Smith (as secretary), and by Hall.  A detail of the document, showing Hall’s signature, is below.

This important document is the latest in a series of gifts from the Du Bois Institute to Houghton Library designed to strengthen Harvard’s increasingly significant research resources for African and African-American history and literature.  Past gifts to Houghton Library have included the papers of playwright Suzan-Lori Parks (*2005M-10); a beautifully illuminated 17th-century Ethiopian manuscript prayerbook; the unique first issue of Fortune’s Freeman; and numerous other rare books and recordings.  Joint purchases have included the papers of Nobel Prize laureate Wole Soyinka; novelists Chinua Achebe and John Edgar Wideman (*1999M-1(b)); writer Albert Murray (*1998M-1), including his correspondence with Ralph Ellison; and several smaller collections (at Houghton), and the June Jordan papers and the Shirley Graham Du Bois papers (at Schlesinger Library) (Links are provided to the finding aids of processed collections).

f MS Am 2642.  Houghton Library, Harvard University.  Images may not be used or reproduced without permission.

José García Villa (1908-1997) grew up in Manila, and as a teenager began to receive attention - both positive and negative - for his poetry. He moved to the United States in 1930 and enrolled at the University of New Mexico, where he founded the literary magazine, Clay, and began to write short stories. He turned back to poetry by the 1940s, playing with formalism, and developed “reversed consonance” and “comma poems,” poetic techniques that drew both contention and critical praise. He worked briefly at the New Directions Publishing Corporation, and beginning in the 1950s, taught and lectured in New York, where he lived until his death. Villa left a large body of work, and is credited with establishing modern writing in English in the Philippines.

Houghton has recently acquired the papers and a collection of the works of Villa, which can be perused on HOLLIS.  Pictured to the left is Villa’s first collection of stories, Footnote to Youth, published in 1933.

PR9550.9.V48 F66 1933. José García Villa, Footnote to Youth. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933. Image may not be reproduced without permission.

In 1785, Jean Jacques Audubon was born in Haiti, the illigitimate son of a French naval officer and his mistress.  Audubon immigrated to the United States at age 18 (anglicizing his name to John James Audubon), and almost immediately began to study its ornithology, hoping to illustrate the birds he observed in a more realistic manner than was common at the time.  His famous work, Birds of America, was published after years of study, from 1840-44.

116 of Audubon’s early drawings, held at Houghton Library and at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, have been published together for the first time in a new publication, Audubon: Early Drawings, available this month from the Harvard University Press.  The drawings are enhanced by an essay on the sources of Audubon’s art by his biographer, Richard Rhodes; transcription of Audubon’s own annotations to the drawings, including information on when and where the specimens were collected; ornithological commentary by Scott V. Edwards, along with reflections on Audubon as scientist; and an account of the history of the Harris collection by Houghton Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts Leslie A. Morris.   More information on the book can be found on the Modern Books & Manuscripts website, the Harvard College Library website, and a slideshow of images from the book may be found here, on the Harvard University Press website.

In the video below, by David Braun of National Geographic, Scott Edwards talks about the book and shows a few of the images:

Image above:  MS Am 21 (88).  Juglane oliveformia. Carolina Parrot in[?] Willow from imitation of colors [?] Psittacus Carolinensis. N.p., 1811 June 9. 1 drawing: watercolor, pastel, graphite, and ink on paper; 43 x 28 cm.

In 1846, while living at Brook Farm (the Transcendentalist utopian experiment in communal living) in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, artist Marianne Dwight (later Orvis) compiled this album of watercolor flower portraits.  Dwight (1816-1901) made a living creating lampshades and paintings, and her detailed punchwork designs can be seen on the cover of the album (click the images to enlarge them):

The album contains twelve paintings of spring and summer flowers.

Pictured below are Lobelia Cardinalis, or Cardinal Flower, for August:

Continue Reading »

We are pleased to announce a new online exhibition, “Public Poet, Private Man: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at 200,” based on the 2007 exhibition curated by Christoph Irmscher.

This exhibition seeks to represent Longfellow as he really was: not as the bogeyman of modernists wanting to exorcize the ghosts of their Victorian past, but as a consummate literary professional who became the most popular poet America has ever had. By foregrounding the “private” Longfellow (the drawings made by and for his children, his journals, and letters written by and to him) alongside the international, multilingual and widely-traveled Longfellow, the exhibition demonstrates how Longfellow re-invented poetry as a public forum for everyone’s private feelings and how he consistently challenged the nationalistic distinction between what is typically and purely “American” and all that is not.

More information on the original exhibition, along with a slideshow of images, may be found here.

We recently acquired two very different manuscript library catalogs: one, a list of books purchased for the Reading Society, Benevolent Society, and Sunday School of Bury, Lancashire from 1806-1826, and the second, the catalogue of the Dundas family’s private library at Melville Castle near Edinburgh, compiled in 1862.  Library catalogs often can be much more accurate gauges of what readers actually read than publishers’ records or advertisments.  Of course, it is still difficult to know exactly how readers engaged with what was available. These two catalogs speak quite specifically to their individual audiences.

The records of the Reading Society indicate that writers such as Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Coleridge, and Maria Edgeworth were popular among these readers.  (Unsurprisingly, there is no Shelley, Keats, or Austen…at least, listed as such).  Aside from fiction, many works on travel were collected, along with works of history, biography, science, and even some nonconformist theology.  Many of the books were purchased from B. Crompton, as on the receipt pictured below (click on the images to enlarge them):

The book itself is a ledger-sized volume, with receipts and lists of books purchased affixed to the pages with straight pins. In this page from 1815, such varied works as Byron’s Hebrew Melodies, The Oxford Sausage, and the three-volume Lewis and Clark’s Travels share company.

Continue Reading »

Among our recent new acquisitions is a manuscript collection of Anne McCaffrey’s 1977 novel Dragonsinger, the second book in her Harper Hall trilogy and a part of the Dragonriders of Pern series.

McCaffrey, a Radcliffe alum originally from Cambridge, has authored over 90 works.  This collection follows the creation of the novel, originally titled “The Harper of Pern,” to its publication, and includes multiple typescript drafts with McCaffrey’s handwritten corrections, the final draft of the novel, and correspondence with McCaffrey’s editor and agent relating to the publication of the novel.  The collection also includes a first edition of the book (*2008-47).

b *2008M-6.  Purchased with the Amy Lowell Fund. Images may not be reproduced without permission.

This ballad, titled “The Chapter on Pockets,” focuses on an essential item that many of us probably take for granted - the portable, convenient, and discreet pocket.

Crudely printed, rife with spelling errors, and displaying a woodcut of a young woman walking in the countryside, the ballad references such disparate figures as Eve and Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (who mentions the necessity for a chapter on pockets, but in keeping with much of his story, never actually writes one).

This version of the ballad, attributed to George Colman (the Younger, 1762-1836), was printed in London around 1819. Printed on cheap paper, the ballad has remained in remarkably good condition.

Click on the image to enlarge it, or click here to read a clearer text of the poem on Google Books.   For an illustration of the ballad’s popularity, click here to see an 1819 playbill for a performance of the ballad in Edinburgh, from the National Library of Scotland’s Playbills of the Theatre Royal Edinburgh collection.

*2007-841.  Purchased with the Amy Lowell fund. Image may not be reproduced without permission.

This broadside, printed with Jack Kerouac’s poem “A Pun for Al Gelpi,” was printed on a handpress here at Harvard by The Lowell-Adams House Printers in 1966. The poem, addressed to Lowell House resident tutor Al Gelpi, refers to a shared joke between Kerouac and Gelpi, explained in this negative print of the poem’s typescript:

One of the scarcest known Kerouac items, this is copy 17 of 100 printed, and is signed by Kerouac at the bottom. The block print was designed by Nicole Hollander.

The Lowell-Adams House Printers, a group of Harvard College students in the mid-1960s, printed poems by many writers, including Noel Coward, Adrienne Rich, and John Updike. A finding aid of their records, held at Houghton, may be viewed here.

*2007-822. Houghton Library, Harvard University. Images may not be reproduced without permission.

This first edition of Mary Custis Vezey’s first collection of poems contains work in Russian and English, as well as translations of Aleksandr Blok and Nikolai Gumilev into English and of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sarah Teasdale, and George Santayana into Russian.

Bilingual poet Mary Custis Vezey (sometimes spelled Mariia Vizi, 1904-1994) was born in New York to a Russian mother and American father. Vezey grew up in St. Petersburg and Harbin, where Vezey’s father published an English-Russian newspaper. As an adult, Vezey lived in Shanghai, and eventually settled in San Francisco in 1973. Vezey published three books of poetry and left many unpublished works following her death at age 90.

Although Vezey has been called (by Olga Bakich, who edited Vezey’s collected works) “the most skilled poet in the group [of women writers in the Russian literary community in Harbin] in terms of her mastery of poetic form,” she still remains relatively unknown.

Vezey presented this copy of her poems to fellow Russian-American writer Margaret Zarudny Freema.

Pictured below is the book’s simple checkered-cloth cover, along with a translation into Russian of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem “I Shall Go Back”:

Pictured below are two of Vezey’s own poems, one in Russian, and one in English.

*2007-819. Houghton Library, Harvard University. Images may not be reproduced without permission.