Modern Books and Manuscripts

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo collection.

The Santo Domingo Collection examines mind-altering substances in every detail: from cultivation and manufacture to distribution, consumption, and finally repercussion. While drug culture and its attendant celebration of drug use constitute much of the collection, many of its volumes also scrutinize the consequences of substance abuse. Earle Albert Rowell’s Dope Adventures of David Dare, published in 1937, is one such work: a semi-fictionalized autobiographical novel concerning an anti-narcotics crusader who lectures high schools and thwarts smugglers. Though Rowell claims that the book is based in the fact of his own experiences, its message suffers somewhat in the face of Dare, his faultless, widely adored, and sanctimonious alter ego. The book also features images of addicts in misery and distress, police arrests, and seized narcotic paraphernalia, all intended to frighten the young reader onto the path of sobriety.

Earle Albert Rowell. Dope Adventures of David Dare. Nashville, Tenn.: Southern Publishing Association, [c1937]. HV5801.R652

Thanks to rare book cataloger Ryan Wheeler for contributing this post.

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection.

This week’s find from the Santo Domingo Collection is an extraordinary copy of Baudelaire’s Les fleurs de mal. Number 1 of a limited edition of 1000 copies published by F. Ferroud in 1917, this copy is extra-illustrated with additional prints of its numerous illustrations: wood engravings by Georges Rochegrosse and etchings by Eugène Decisy, from the frontispiece portrait of Baudelaire to the ornaments that frame the text throughout. It’s bound in full dark brown morocco and set in a decorated paper slipcase. What sets this copy apart completely, however, is that it’s cased with a companion volume of Rochegrosse’s original illustrations, with annotations in pencil to indicate their placement in the finished book. The title page and frontispiece of the novel and the original illustration have both been included below for comparison. Bringing this remarkable set into Houghton’s catalog required both a a bibliographic record for the volume of poems and a manuscript record for the volume of original illustrations.

Charles Baudelaire. Les fleurs du mal. Paris: Librairie des amateurs A. Ferroud, F. Ferroud, successeur, 1917. FC8.B3247.917f.

Georges Rochegrosse illustrations for Les fleurs du mal: drawings, 1917. FC8.B3247.917f.

Thanks to rare book cataloger Ryan Wheeler for contributing this post.

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection.

The two volumes featured today demonstrate the enduring appeal of the scatological. La crépitonomie, ou l’art des pets (1815) and L’art de péter: essai théori-physique et méthodique (1776) are two humorous works on flatulence: the former a book-length poem and the latter an essay. Though their authors are anonymized in the books themselves, we know them to have been written by Ducastel de Saint-Paul and Pierre-Thomas-Nicolas Hurtaut. Both volumes feature frontispieces that satirize the symbolic grandeur that might attend such illustrations in more serious works.

Ducastel de Saint-Paul. La crépitonomie.  A Paris: Chez L. G. Michaud, imprimeur du roi, MDCCCVX [1815]. FC8.D8558.815c.

Pierre-Thomas-Nicolas Hurtaut. L’art de péter. En Westphalie, [i.e. Paris]: Chez Florent-Q, rue Pet-en-Gueule, au Soufflet., MDCCLXXVI [1776]. FC7.H9477.776ab.

Thanks to rare book cataloger Ryan Wheeler for contributing this post.

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection.

Drugs and sexuality constitute the primary subject matter in Santo Domingo, but the collection’s larger function is to investigate the many altered states of the human mind. The collection therefore contains a substantial number of volumes on the occult, such as this work: The anatomy of the body of God, by occultist Charles Stansfield Jones (1886-1950), a member of Aleister Crowley’s order. Jones here writes under the name of Frater Achad, one of many titles and pseudonyms he adopted during his career. Several diagrams accompany this cabalistic text, including this colored frontispiece.

This edition”This first edition of The anatomy of the body of God consists of 22 copies, lettered Aleph to Tau, and 228 copies numbered 1 to 228″–Colophon. This copy is number 6.

Frater Achad. The anatomy of the body of God. Chicago: Collegium ad Spiritum Sanctum [i.e. Will Ransom], 1925. BF1999 .J55.

Thanks to rare book cataloger Ryan Wheeler for contributing this post.

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection.

Today we feature two twentieth-century French erotic novels: Pauline Réage’s Histoire d’O and Jean Lorrain’s Le maison Philibert, both extravagantly bound by the French binder Alain Devauchelle. On the front cover of Histoire d’O, tessellations of brightly dyed calf and morocco panels form a kaleidoscopic letter O. The binding of Le maison Philibert, with its glossy pink snakeskin-textured calf, its panels of black lace and foil-stamped leather, and the rose suede lining its endpapers and slipcase, can only be described as striking.

Jean Lorrain. Le maison Philibert. Paris: Librairie Universelle, 1904. FC8.L8938.904m.

Pauline Reage. Histoire d’O. A Sceaux: Chez Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1954. PQ2635.E15H5 1954x

Thanks to rare book cataloger Ryan Wheeler for contributing this post.

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection.

Books in the Santo Domingo collection are predominantly in English and French, per the collecting habits of Julio Mario Santo Domingo himself. Today we have an exception to this rule: Sexuální nocturno, by the avant-garde Czech author Vítězslav Nezval (1900-1958). Printed in a limited run of 137 copies, this edition is illustrated with a series of psychosexual black and white collages by surrealist artist Jindřich Štyrský (1899-1942), who also typeset and published the book.

Thanks to rare book cataloger Ryan Wheeler for contributing this post.

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection.

Today’s volume, an 1860 edition of Baudelaire’s Les paradis artificiels: opium et haschisch, is handsomely appointed in navy morocco and marbled paper boards, with a matching suede-lined slipcase. It bears the bookplates of the French writer Maxime Du Camp and the Belgian diplomat Louis de Sadeleer, and is inscribed from Baudelaire to Du Camp on the half-title page. Perhaps most interesting of all, though, is a manuscript letter from Baudelaire to the writer and editor Alphonse de Colonne, dated September 8, 1858, and tipped onto a blank preliminary leaf. In it, Baudelaire refers to the imminent completion of an unnamed text to be sent to Colonne for editing, and promises that ‘tomorrow I can resume your opium, and it will be swallowed’

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The volume arrived with two additional Baudelaire letters laid in: one to August Poulet-Malassis, the publisher of this edition of Les paradis artificels; and the other to an unnamed correspondent. As they are not attached to the volume, these letters have been removed and cataloged as part of the Santo Domingo manuscript collection.

Charles Baudelaire. Les paradis artificels, opium et haschisch. Paris: Poulet-Malassis et de Broise, 1860. FC8.B3247.860p (B).

Thanks to rare book cataloger Ryan Wheeler for contributing this post.

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection.

Les fleurs animées is a beautiful lithographic collection in two volumes that was illustrated in the mid 19th-century by J.J. Grandville, whose real name was Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard.  The book imagines a world where the flowers are able to reclaim the meanings bestowed upon them by a covetous Victorian audience and thus they go out into the world to pursue a dream other than simple adornment.  They long to experience life so they ask the Flower Fairy to allow them to assume human form.   A translation of their plea reads,

“For thousands of years we have supplied mankind with their themes of comparison; we alone have given them all their metaphors; indeed, without us poetry could not exist. Men lend to us their virtues and their vices; their good and their bad qualities; it is time that we should have some experience of what these are.“

So off they go to become nuns, teachers, fortune-tellers, village maidens, and nurses.

Grandville initially gained notice with his lithographic collection Les Métamorphoses du jour, a series of scenes in which individuals with the bodies of men and faces of animals are made to play a human comedy.  He is often credited with being a precursor to the Surrealist movement.  Grandville’s skill in representing human characteristics in animal features brought him success and led to his contribution to a number of French periodicals.  Through this work he became known for his satirical political caricatures and an extremely popular illustrator.  However the return of censorship in 1835 forced him to return to mainly book illustration where he worked on many of the greats like Gulliver’s Travels and Robinson Crusoe.  During this time Grandville continued to publish beautiful lithographic collections like Les fleurs animées. (Paris: Gabriel de Gonet, [ca. 1847]).  NC248.G7 F63 1847.

Thanks to Alison Harris, Santo Domingo Project Manager, for contributing this post.

This post is part of  an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection.

This week, we have a book whose ownership can be traced back three generations: first to the Santo Domingo family; then to Gérard Nordmann, from whose estate the Santo Domingos purchased it; and finally to René Bonnel, publisher of the work, for this was his personal copy. Paul Verlaine’s Hombres, published in an edition of 100 copies (plus this special copy printed for Bonnel), reprints Verlaine’s erotic poetry collection, also including a facsimile of a manuscript letter written by Verlaine (the “lettre de Paliseul” referred to beneath the title) and a transcription of the same. In Bonnel’s private copy, however, the original letter is bound into the volume alongside the facsimile; the letter offers a glimpse both of Verlaine’s original hand and of his scatological sense of humor:

Hombres. Ségovie [i.e. Paris] : A l’enseigne de la Grenade [i.e. René Bonnel], 1926. FC8.V5895.904hb (B)

Thanks to rare book cataloger Ryan Wheeler for contributing this post.

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection.

Tights, unitards, and spandex are probably the top three words that come to mind when one pictures a superhero’s wardrobe, but let us not forget the capes!  Sure Superman and Batman are the typical cape wearing suspects, but there are plenty of other comic book heroes that wore capes, like Spy Smasher and The Doll Man!

Originally created by Bill Parker and C.C. Beck the Spy Smasher was introduced in Whiz Comic’s No. 2 in February 1940 as a shadowy figure of menace to villians.  Spy Smasher, also known as Alan Armstrong, was a master detective who possessed a number of gadgets, in particular a specialized vehicle called the “Gyrosub” which was a combination airplane, automobile, and submarine.  Spy Smasher was such a popular character at the time that a film was made in 1942 starring Kane Richmond, where the Spy Smasher battles a Nazi villain called The Mask.  The Harvard Film Archive actually has a print of this film version of Spy Smasher.  Another comic book caped-hero was The Doll Man, a research chemist named Darrell Dane, who invents a formula that shrinks him down to 6 inches, but allows him to retain the strength of his normal-sized self in order to fight criminals.  In his first adventure he rescues his fiance Martha Roberts, and decides after his success to fight crime in a red and blue costume that Martha sews for him.  Often referred to as “The World’s Mightiest Mite,”  he battled villains such as the Black Gondolier, the Vulture, and the Phantom Duelist. 

The Doll Man was created by comics legend Will Eisner and originally published by Quality Comics.  Both of these comics are special reprints by Flashback, a company that specialized in providing inexpensive reprints of often rare and expensive Golden Age Comic Books.  The Golden Age of Comic Books began in America in the late 1930s and lasted until the late 1940s.  During this time modern comic books featuring superheroes were first published and became hugely popular resulting in a significant comic book industry.  Comics also began to emerge as a mainstream art form during this Golden Age, however after World War II popularity of the superhero comic waned so many publishers branched out into horror, science fiction,  romance, and Western comics. 

Both of these comics can be found in our online catalog- Spy Smasher, no. 1. East Moline, Ill. : Special Edition Reprints, 1974. PN6726.F55 no.24 and The Doll Man quarterly, no. 1. East Moline, Ill. : Special Edition Reprints, 1974. PN6726.F55 no.9.

Thanks to Alison Harris, Santo Domingo Project Manager, for contributing this post.

This post is part of  an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection.

The Marquis de Sade, author and provocateur, spent the end of his life imprisoned for having produced, among other works, Justine, ou, Les malheurs de la vertu. This copy from the Santo Domingo Collection, formerly owned by Gérard Nordmann, is one of the earliest printings of that title in 1791. As suits Nordmann’s collecting habits, this copy is unusual for two reasons: first, that it includes both the preliminaries “Explication de l’estampe” and “Avis de l’éditeur”, missing from most copies; second, that it features a puncture wound that pierces both covers and the entire text block. According to a French bookseller’s description pasted into the front cover, the volume acquired this distinctive feature when it was nailed to a pillory. In this image, the nail’s mark is visible just above the U in the title:

Marquis de Sade. Justine, ou, Les malheurs de la vertu. En Hollande [i.e. Paris]: Chez les Libraires Associés [i.e. J.V. Girouard], 1791. FC7.Sa152.791ja

Thanks to rare book cataloger Ryan Wheeler for contributing this post.

This post is part of  an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection.

Continuing with the Gérard Nordmann holdings within the Santo Domingo collection, we have this copy of L’École des biches, ou, Mœurs des petites dames de ce temps. Attributed to a small handful of authors, published anonymously for a small group of subscribers and not publicly sold, this edition of 300 copies is cryptically dated “1863-1910.” Nordmann’s copy is handsomely bound in quarter leather over decorated paper boards, but its most outstanding feature lies within: numerous hand-painted aquarelle illustrations throughout the text, of which two of the least salacious are here reproduced.

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Funding from the Ruth Miller Memorial Philanthropic Fund enabled Houghton to catalog a collection of American broadsides this summer.  In a spectacularly productive two-month period, graduate student Agnes Coakley cataloged 770 broadsides, making them readily available to readers for the first time.

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This post is part of  an ongoing series featuring items from the newly-acquired Santo Domingo collection.

We have another item from Gérard Nordmann’s collection this week. Guy de Maupassant’s 1875 quasi-pornographic drama A la feuille de rose, maison turque was published in this edition of 225 copies in 1945; Nordmann’s copy was subsequently bound in this arresting magenta leather inset with panels of pink and rose snakeskin. The custom binding retains the book’s original paper wrappers.

Likely the most interesting feature of this volume, however, is its frontispiece: one leaf features an erotic illustration, while a second is decorated with stage doors and cut to allow the reader to open them onto the scene.

A la feuille de rose, maison turque: comédie de moeurs (mauvaises) en un acte en prose représentée pour la première fois à Paris en 1875.  Paris: : [s.n.], 1945. FC8.M4452.945a (B).

Thanks to rare book cataloger Ryan Wheeler for contributing this post.

The Modern Books and Manuscripts department is pleased to announce the acquisition of the Julio Mario Santo Domingo collection, comprising over 50,000 books, manuscripts, works of art, audio recordings and films, placed on long-term deposit at Harvard by the collector’s son, Julio Mario Santo Domingo III. The Santo Domingo Collection enriches and greatly expands the University’s research materials on psychoactive drugs and their physical and social effects—from cultivation and synthesis to the myriad cultural and counter-cultural products linked to altered states of mind.  Rich in scientific and medical works, it documents in depth both the benefits of controlled use and the horrors of addiction. The bulk of the collection, however, explores drug use by individuals and the influence such use and users had on their society, with emphasis on the 1800s and 1900s in America and France. Other areas in which the collection is particularly rich include erotica, French pulp publications, and materials documenting countercultural movements.

We’ll be featuring items from the collection regularly here on our blog, so check back often.

Swiss bibliophile Gérard Nordmann (1930-1992) made a lifelong avocation of collecting rare and obscure erotic works. Many of these are clandestine or anonymous publications, printed with false authors and imprints or none at all and often distributed to a private society of subscribers. Nordmann prided himself on collecting works, or versions of works, so rare that they didn’t appear in the catalog of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. His extraordinary collection went to auction in 2006, and Julio Santo Domingo purchased a number of its volumes; they are now at Harvard.

Tableaux des mœurs du temps dans les différents âges de la vie (1867), one such clandestine imprint, is attributed to the author Claude-Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon and to the publisher Auguste Poulet-Malassis. While this copy may not have the most lavish binding among those in Nordmann’s collection, the gilt-stamped satyrs on its cover (see top left) helpfully apprise the reader of its contents. The interior, though, is rather more interesting. In addition to the printed engravings originally illustrating the volume, a matching set of hand-colored engravings is included; better still, six engravings are accompanied by a hand-painted impression of the illustration, making for three versions total. The three renditions of one illustration are pictured above for comparison.

This extravagant extra-illustration continues with twelve aquarelles painted directly onto the text (left). Illustrations like these are likely to have been commissioned for the book by one of its former owners, rendering the copy genuinely unique.

Tableaux des mœurs du temps dans les différents âges de la vie. PQ1971.C6 A77 1867.

Thanks to Houghton rare book cataloger Ryan Wheeler, who is currently cataloging the books in the Santo Domingo library, for contributing this post. To find other material from this collection, search HOLLIS for “Julio Santo Domingo Collection.”

Please drop by Houghton to see our latest exhibition:  From Austen to Zola: Amy Lowell as a Collector opens today, and runs through January 12, 2013.

Amy Lowell – a controversial, cigar-smoking, outspoken, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet – collected works by prominent creative artists such as Jane Austen, Ludwig von Beethoven, William Blake, Charlotte Brontë, John Keats, Michelangelo, Walt Whitman and Émile Zola. A selection from the thousands of rare books and manuscripts collected by Lowell, and bequeathed to Harvard in 1925, are showcased in this exhibition.

Lowell was one of the few women competing in the male-dominated world of collecting. She began at age 17 by purchasing Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels with her Christmas money. The exhibition includes several works by William Blake, another of her early collecting interests, including Songs of Innocence (1789); a sketch by Michelangelo on the back of a work order (1523); letters by Voltaire, Jane Austen, and Harriet Beecher Stowe; love letters from Lord Nelson to Lady Hamilton, and John Keats to Fanny Brawne; manuscripts by Ben Jonson, Jean La Fontaine, Charlotte Brontë, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson; books owned by Charles I and the Empress Josephine; and much, much more.

The exhibition, on display in the Edison and Newman Room in Houghton Library, is free and open to the public during Houghton’s regular hours.

On August 20, 1940, Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky was attacked in his home in Coyoacán, Mexico. Trotsky was accosted in his study, where he was reading reports of the Battle of Britain in the newspaper.  His attacker, Ramon Mercader, bludgeoned Trotsky in the head with an ice axe; Trotsky died in a nearby hospital twenty-six hours later.

Adding to our extensive collection of Trotsky’s papers, we have recently acquired the copy of Ultimas Noticias de Excelsior that Trotsky was purportedly reading when he was attacked. The newspaper, spattered with blood, was retrieved by one of Trotsky’s guards, Henry Schnautz.

Images of the newspaper can be seen after the jump.

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This image of a skeleton kneeling on a book is part of a set of ten bookplates. They reproduce on silk prints by several eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century wood engravers, including Thomas Bewick (1753-1828). Other subjects depicted in the set include Aesop’s fable of the fox and the stork; a medal portrait of the mathematician Charles Hutton, for whom Bewick illustrated a number of books; and a hunting scene, which was a topic Bewick often illustrated. Some of these wood-engravings were first printed on paper. It is probable that not all were intended to be used as bookplates as eight bear no name.

These bookplates were in the private collection of Philip Hofer (1898-1984), founder and first Curator of the Printing and Graphic Arts Department at Houghton. Over his career as curator and book collector, Hofer had a number of bookplates made for his collection. He also collected depictions of the Dance of Death and one of his bookplates, made after a fifteenth-century woodcut, represented a winged skeleton with a bow and arrow.

Typ 805.21.2277. Collection of bookplates printed on silk, [ca. 1850?]. Bequest of Philip Hofer, 1984.

Thanks to Caroline Duroselle-Melish, Assistant Curator of Printing and Graphic Arts, for contributing this post.

The “Bookplate of the Week” series is on hiatus this week; for a bookplate related to this post, click here.

Work continues apace on our project to digitize the Dickinson family library. 59 books are now available to view through the Dickinson family library finding aid (click on the “Digital Content” tab at the top of the screen) and HOLLIS. On average, eight books are digitized each month.

Books containing marks of use have been prioritized; Dickinson family library books often contain pencil marks, dog-eared corners, and botanical specimens pressed between pages. Some examples of recently digitized volumes include:

Elegant extracts : a copious selection of instructive, moral, and entertaining passages, from the most eminent prose writers. Boston: Wells and Lilly, 1826. EDR 507.

The four extant volumes of this set are heavily marked, and include many dog-eared pages:

H.G. Ollendorf. Ollendorf’s new method of learning to read, write, and speak the German language… New York: Appleton, 1846. EDR 23.

Emily Dickinson’s German textbook, signed on the title page, with a note in German in her handwriting inserted, and some marks throughout:

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The Golden Legend. Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1852 [i.e. 1851]. EDR 286.

This volume of Longfellow’s poetry is heavily marked with vertical pencil lines in the margins.

While many books in the Dickinson family library contain marks of use, few contain actual annotations.  In the volume of Longfellow one reader (most likely Susan Huntington Dickinson, the poet’s sister-in-law, with whom she often shared books) wrote, “I don’t like this”.

For more information on the Dickinson collection at Houghton, see our website, and continue to follow this blog for updates.

If most books are collaborations, the Monuments of Moscow Antiquities (Памятники Московой Древности), issued in fascicles between 1842 and 1845, is an unusually instructive one, memorializing both Russian cultural life under Tsar Nicholas I (r. 1825-1855) and the state of printing in mid-19^th-century Moscow.

Although his name does not appear on the title-page, this work was the brainchild of Aleksei Olenin (1763-1843).  Olenin, an official of noble birth, was an artist, an archaeologist, and an ethnographer.  By the breadth and trend of his interests, he exemplified the intellectuals of his generation who sought a native Russian culture and a national past pre-dating the Europeanizing influence of Peter the Great.  Olenin secured the patronage of Nicholas I, who shared these interests and sought use them to strengthen the Russian state and Empire.  Olenin passionately desired to discover and preserve the artifacts of Russia’s past, and to document and publish them to the world.

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