Modern Books and Manuscripts

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. 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. 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. 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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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