Modern Books and Manuscripts

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Searching for information about flowers, medicine, and the secret to great skin?  Look no further than this beautifully illustrated French volume Les fleurs et secretz de medecine. Until the late 19th-century the practice of bloodletting was regularly used [...]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Today’s volume from the Santo Domingo Collection concerns Montmartre, the famous Parisian district of artists’ communes and nightclubs. In Les après-midi de Montmartre, published in 1919, author René Baudu documents the drinking, drug use, and prostitution that attended [...]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Most people picture a chastity belt as a device that looks like iron underwear (complete with a lock) that was meant to keep a woman from having sexual relations.  Legend has it that this device was invented during [...]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Today’s Santo Domingo Feature: this copy of Deux coeurs simples, by the French novelist Jacques de Lacretelle. This limited edition, published by Gérald Cramer in 1947, features a suite of evocative lithographs by illustrator Valentine Hugo. This particular [...]

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Known for his contributions to logic, set theory, and semantics, Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000) stands among the most influential American philosophers of the twentieth century. From 1956 until his retirement in 1978 Quine held the Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy at Harvard University, and his papers and library are now held by Houghton Library. [...]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. As the use of hallucinogenic drugs proliferated in the counterculture of the 1960s, instructional texts appeared to guide novice users in the preparation and consumption of these substances. This week’s volume from the Santo Domingo Collection, The psychedelic [...]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Though the Santo Domingo Collection is exhaustive in its coverage of opium and LSD, this week we feature a text on a perfectly legal drug: alcohol. A literary gent: a study in vanity and dipsomania, published in 1895 [...]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Joel Dorman Steele, Ph.D. was the author of a series of textbooks in late 19th-century America including Hygienic physiology : with special reference to the use of alcoholic drinks and narcotics.  It was meant to be used not [...]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. What to do if you are looking for the “ultimate guide for safe mushroom picking”?  Frank and Cheeri Rinaldo have got you covered with Safe-pik, a flip book of handy mushroom identification cards.  Measuring only about 2 1/2 [...]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. The Santo Domingo Collection gathers together publications ranging from the 16th century to the present day, and from the mass-market to the obscure. Obscure indeed is this week’s feature: a selection of issues from Hawkfrendz, a British fanzine [...]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo collection. The opium dens prevalent in France and the United States during the 19th century, as well as the culture surrounding them, resulted in copious literature, such as this rarely-seen work: Le livre de la fumée, by [...]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Could it be true that similar animal forms share the same habits?  José Joaquim da Gama Machado certainly thought so, and produced the text and drawings to back it up.  Machado was a 19th-century scientist who studied homeopathy, [...]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo collection. This week, we depart briefly from drugs and the counterculture to focus on the aesthetic beauty of modern books. Gallows Orchard, a romantic tragedy by first-time Scottish author Claire Spencer, was published in this American edition [...]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo collection. The illustrated presidential report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography is the product of curious historical circumstance. Authorized by Congress to investigate the validity of obscenity laws in 1967, during Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, the Commission’s [...]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo collection. The works of Aleister Crowley, the British occultist and author at turns renowned and infamous, are ably suited for inclusion in the Santo Domingo Collection: Crowley’s mysticism, drug use, bisexuality, and overall libertinism, emblemized in his [...]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo collection. Known for the openly sexual themes in his work as well as for his battle with opium addiction, the creative polymath Jean Cocteau is a fitting author for inclusion in the Santo Domingo Collection. Maison de [...]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo collection. The volumes in the Santo Domingo Collection are variously remarkable for their content, their condition, their presentation, and their provenance. Perhaps the most arresting example yet of the latter is this unassuming item: Kokain, a German [...]

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Today we focus our attention on books from the publishing house of book dealer, collector, and Henry Miller expert Roger Jackson. Based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Jackson is Managing Editor of Nexus: The International Henry Miller Journal, and co-author of authoritative Miller bibliographies.  Since 1994 Jackson has published limited edition books by and about Henry [...]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo collection. A curiosity from the Santo Domingo Collection this week, reflective of Julio Santo Domingo’s far-ranging interest in French history and culture: this broadside, printed in France by Librairie Hayard in 1944: The front is printed with [...]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo collection. Previous posts in this space have focused on the erotica in the Santo Domingo Collection, but prurience is not the only aspect of sexuality to be found there: the medical, psychological, and social history of sex [...]

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