Modern Books and Manuscripts

The John Updike Archive, a vast collection of manuscripts, correspondence, books, photographs, artwork and other papers, has been acquired by Houghton Library. The Archive forms the definitive collection of Updike material, said Leslie Morris, Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts at Houghton Library, and will make the library the center for studies on the author’s [...]

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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 [...]

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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 Ball.  [...]

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By examining a reader’s annotations in the margins of a book, it can be possible to obtain insight into what might have influenced that reader’s own writing.   We recently acquired both a copy of J.W. Mackail’s Latin Literature owned and annotated by T.S. Eliot, as well as Allen Ginsberg’s copy of T.S. Eliot’s Collected [...]

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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 consummate [...]

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This ballad, titled “The Chapter on Pockets,” focuses on an essential item that many of us probably take for granted – the portable, convenient, and discreet pocket.
Crudely printed, rife with spelling errors, and displaying a woodcut of a young woman walking in the countryside, the ballad references such disparate figures as Eve and Lawrence Sterne’s [...]

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This broadside, printed with Jack Kerouac’s poem “A Pun for Al Gelpi,” was printed on a handpress here at Harvard by The Lowell-Adams House Printers in 1966. The poem, addressed to Lowell House resident tutor Al Gelpi, refers to a shared joke between Kerouac and Gelpi, explained in this negative print of the poem’s [...]

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In an 1820 letter to his son, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe stated that English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was hard at work translating Goethe’s closet drama Faust. Coleridge and his friends, however, openly expressed dislike for the German poet, and in 1834, Coleridge wrote, “I need not tell you that I never put [...]

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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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Alfred Tennyson first published his poem “Sea Dreams. An Idyll” in Macmillan’s Magazine in its January 1860 issue (for which he was paid between £250 and £300, an enormous sum for a single poem). We recently acquired the page proofs for this printing of the poem, with numerous manuscript annotations by Tennyson. [...]

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Mikhail Gerasimov (1889-1939) was one of the most popular Russian writers of the early twentieth century. A member of the working class, Gerasimov joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1907, and published work extensively in Bolshevik journals. (He became disillusioned with the Party and left it in 1921.) He was also a [...]

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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 [...]

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