A number of Houghton Library incunables—books printed using moveable type before 1501—were donated between 1955 and 1965 by Ward M. Canaday, member of the Harvard College class of 1907. Several of those books were deposited in Houghton by Adriana R. Salem before being purchased by Canaday; Cambridge had been the end-point of Salem’s trans-Atlantic journey Read More
Dale Stinchcomb
Undergraduates at Houghton, Part I: Consolidating Works on Manuscripts
This coming fall will see the opening of Beyond Words: Illuminated Manuscripts in Boston Collections, an exhibition of medieval and Renaissance books from local institutions. The Houghton Library will loan the vast majority of the manuscripts on display, and the library will also act as one of three venues for the exhibition. Preparations are not Read More
William King Richardson, Part III: Mischievous Billy Richardson
It is good to see good work being done by colleagues on a great collection. But let’s not be too solemn about the collector and the collected, no matter his degrees and trophies. After all, he wasn’t. “Billy” traveled in certain social circles and had a lot of fun in doing so. Edith Wharton, the Read More
William King Richardson, Part II: “One of the most remarkable specimens of XVth century binding I have ever seen.”
In April the library began a three month project entering provenance information from Houghton incunabula into the Manuscript Evidence in Incunabula database (MEI). Maintained by the Consortium of European Research Libraries, MEI enables scholars to research and compare copy-specific features in incunabula across an international multitude of repositories. These two sets of image show the Read More
William King Richardson, Part I: Diplomas and Certificates
William King Richardson (1859–1951) was a member of the Harvard College Class of 1880. Just two years later he earned a double first at Balliol College, Oxford University (purportedly the first American to obtain this distinction at Oxford). His library was begun at the Lord Amherst of Hackney sale in 1908. For more than forty Read More