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. 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 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 [...]

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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 [...]

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While we don’t usually acquire multiple copies of the same book, we broke that rule with two recent accessions. Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) published Das Lied von der Glocke (“The Song of the Bell”) in 1798.  It remains one of the most well-known German poems, and has been translated into many languages. In 1873, the Dryden [...]

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In the summer of 1869, Transcendentalist philosopher, essayist, and famed Concordian Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was presented with a challenging task.  Harvard College assigned him to obtain donations from fellow members of the Class of 1821.  The College wished to raise a sum of $500,000, a substantial sum even today. Emerson did not rush to [...]

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Charles Armitage Brown (1787-1842) is perhaps best known for his friendship with the poet John Keats.  A skilled amateur artist, Brown is responsible for one of the most recognizable images of his friend. Houghton recently acquired a bound album of Brown’s drawings, produced between 1809 and 1811.  The ink drawings include sixty-four heads, studies Brown [...]

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In 1818, poet John Keats (1795-1821) met Fanny Brawne (1800-1865), his neighbor in Hampstead.  Keats was immediately intrigued by Brawne’s intelligence and beauty.  The two fell in love, despite the obstacles of Keats’s health and poor finances.  They exchanged frequent letters, and Brawne inspired some of Keats’s most well-known poetry. Houghton is currently exhibiting items [...]

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Modern has recently acquired the Report of the Proceedings in the Cause of Mary Alice Orford, versus Thomas Butler Cole, Esq. for a breach of promise of marriage…, published in 1818 following the trial on March 30th of that year. This sensational case was, according to The Times, “the subject of general conversation throughout the [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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If your gadgets are on the fritz, or you just feel like technology is taking over your life, let Fuller’s Computing Telegraph take you back to a simpler time of slide rules and mental arithmetic (and don’t worry, the irony of blogging about this isn’t lost on me): This “computer” is one of the earliest [...]

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“The Wind begun to rock the Grass,” by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) is one of the most textually interesting in her corpus. She revised it over a period of nearly twenty years, and five versions survive: four in autograph, and one transcript of a lost autograph original. That “lost” original has now been recovered, and has [...]

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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 rhyming, [...]

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