Modern Books and Manuscripts

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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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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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 [...]

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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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