Collections in Focus

The Master of the Harvard Hannibal

19 March 2015 Dale Stinchcomb Collections in Focus

The Master of the Harvard Hannibal was given his name by the art historian Millard Meiss after the artist’s work on the large frontispiece miniature depicting the “Coronation of Hannibal” in volume II of Houghton Library’s MS Richardson 32. The artist trained in Paris in the circle of the Boucicaut Master in the first two Read More

Anti-Opium

3 March 2015 houghtonmodern Collections in Focus

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring material from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Today’s feature from the Santo Domingo collection is both a rare volume and an artifact of the fraught history of the opium trade in China. Convened in the 1890s, the Anti-Opium League was part of a movement on the part Read More

Printed and Bound at the Monastery

16 February 2015 Dale Stinchcomb Collections in Focus

A recent acquisition from Nina Musinsky Rare Books in New York is a copy of Leonardus de Utino’s Sermones de Sanctis, printed, probably rubricated and certainly bound at the Monastery of SS. Ulrich and Afra in Augsburg in 1474. An inscription records it as a gift by Johannes Lescher, Rector of St. Martin’s church in Read More

Demons and devils

28 October 2014 houghtonmodern Collections in Focus

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Though outnumbered by books on drugs and sexuality, the Santo Domingo Collection’s occult works are nonetheless considerable in number. Featured today are two early works on demonology, one by a French political philosopher and statesman, and the other by Read More

D.H. Lawrence on strike

10 October 2014 houghtonmodern Collections in Focus

The Modern Books and Manuscripts department recently acquired the manuscript of D.H. Lawrence’s short story “Her Turn.” Ten onionskin pages depict a battle of wills between a husband and wife fighting over shares of the husband’s strike pay. The story was timely – Lawrence composed it over a three-day period in March 1912, during a Read More