Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 28th, 2008 2 Comments »
At a loss for a new rainy day activity? Need to work on your dating skills? Try this parlor game from the 1820s…
The set, which arrived in its original box, includes forty hand-colored cards depicting men and women. The twenty cards picturing men each contain a member of a different profession and a [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 28th, 2008 No Comments »
This is the first of four parts of a juvenile geography, titled Di li shü lin væn-koh kwu-kying z-tì yiu-tin kong-tsing, and published in China in 1852. Its author, William Alexander Parsons Martin (1827-1916), was an American Presbyterian minister who lived and worked in China and Japan for almost forty years.
The book is [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 28th, 2008 No Comments »
On June 14, 1865, the following telegram was sent from Inspector General James Allen Hardie (1823-1876) to Dr. John Gray:
The telegram reads: “The secretary of war requests that you come immediately to Washington for the purpose of making a medical examination of Payne the man who attempted to assassinate Sec. Seward please answer how soon [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 27th, 2008 2 Comments »
Benedict von Wagemann (1763-1837), a physician in Ehingen, Germany, published Die konstitutionelle Monarchie der Thiere in 1823. The work describes, in rhyming verse, a council of animals who meet to discuss their current political situation. The animals rebel against their king, design a constitution, and elect representatives to govern themselves.
The engraved frontispiece [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 25th, 2008 1 Comment »
In 1950, in Key West, playwright Tennessee Williams finished a second draft of “The Rose Tattoo,” a play he had begun the year before in Rome. Williams called this draft the “kitchen sink” draft, reasoning that “I have thrown into it every dramatic element I could think of. Perhaps all of them will work. [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 24th, 2008 No Comments »
We recently added this first edition of Alfonso Reyes’s El Testimonio de Juan Peña to our collections of Latin American writers and artists:
A Mexican writer, philosopher, and diplomat, Reyes served as Mexican Ambassador to Brazil from 1930-36, publishing this work in Rio de Janeiro in 1930. The story is semi-autobiographical, and explores ideas of [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 13th, 2008 1 Comment »
In 1910, Horace de Vere Cole and five friends, including Virginia Stephen (who would marry Leonard Woolf in 1912) and her brother Adrian Stephen (a classmate of Cole’s), coordinated and successfully carried out an elaborate hoax against the Royal Navy.
Cole began by sending a telegram to the HMS Dreadnought, moored in Dorset, telling the [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 12th, 2008 1 Comment »
For our inaugural post, may we present:
Published in the mid-1820s, Musée des Dames et des Demoiselles includes six small books covered in lavender paper and packed together in a blue and gilt paper gift box. Each book covers a different area of science appropriate for delicate demoiselles: fruit, flowers, minerals, butterflies, insects, and birds. Along [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 1st, 2008 No Comments »
Welcome to the new acquisitions blog for Modern Books & Manuscripts at the Houghton Library. Check back here to see what we’ve added to our collections!