This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Description of the Retreat, an institution near York, for insane persons of the Society of Friends is a volume by Samuel Tuke who was a Quaker and mental-health reformer in early 19th-century England. Tuke believed in this new Read More
Collections in Focus
Auspicious Debuts: Dear Liar
On July 31, 1957, a thin crowd at MIT’s Kresge Auditorium in Cambridge, Mass. listened as Jerome Kilty (Harvard ’41) and Cavada Humphrey read—or pretended to read—from the correspondence of George Bernard Shaw, “the well-known vegetarian,” and famed English actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Campbell. Perhaps some day, if you are very good and behave properly Read More
Gigantic Bats in Space!
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Voyage dans la lune avant 1900 is an extraordinary French children’s book that is composed primarily of color lithographs by Herold & Cie., which are based on the original designs of A. de Ville d’Avray’s. Almost nothing about Read More
The works of David Gasgoyne
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. The Santo Domingo collection is broad in scope, but its many volumes also accommodate exhaustive collecting of a number of particular authors. Among these is David Gascoyne (1916-2001), the British poet and translator known for his association with Read More
What’s New: Acquisitions from the Collection of Charlotte and Arthur Vershbow
In the second half of the twentieth century Charlotte and Arthur Vershbow of Boston formed a notable private rare book collection. They were close friends of Philip Hofer, founding curator of Houghton Library’s Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, and their collecting was deeply influenced by Hofer’s collection and attitude toward collecting. After the deaths Read More