On this day seventy-five years ago, 3 January 1942, library staff and their families attended a private celebration to mark the opening of the new Houghton Library. As the Second World War raged in two theaters, William A. Jackson, the new Library’s first director, and Philip Hofer, the founding curator of its Department of Printing Read More
Dale Stinchcomb
Footprints of a Bibliographical Ghost
Seymour de Ricci created this bibliographical ghost in his Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada (New York, 1935), in an entry on the library of the late Harvard University Professor Charles Eliot Norton (I, 1059). de Ricci described there three leaves from the Psalter and Hours written probably in Read More
A picture is worth a thousand words
We have all heard it. If you think of googling it, by the way, don’t—nobody really knows who said it first. We have all said it. Ironically, even writers are fond of it. “The drawing shows me at one glance what might be spread over ten pages in a book,” says Evgenii Bazarov, the revolutionary-inclined Read More
Houghton Incunable finds its Mate after Two Centuries
Not long ago, Houghton Library acquired a copy of the first half of an edition of the works of Thomas Aquinas printed in Basel by Michael Wenssler in 1485 (Inc 7508) – the first half, I say, because the collection was issued in three parts, of which the second itself consisted of two parts, and Read More
Undergraduates at Houghton, Part III: Iberian Books Project
A sure-fire way to learn just how rare the books in a rare book library can be is to try documenting potential evidence of their existence. Since May, I have scanned images of 164 books and pamphlets at Houghton. The demands of the task required me to call for items in batches, instead of attempting Read More