Houghton Library Blog

Born-Digital Blog Post #1: The Beginning

2 February 2018 ameze In Practice

This post continues the series, “Behind the Scenes at Houghton”, giving a glimpse into the inner workings of the library’s mission to support teaching and research. Thanks to Magdaline Lawhorn, Administrative Fellow & Project Archivist, for contributing this post.

Floppy disks from the Vladimir Nabokov Family Papers, circa 1920-2000. Houghton Library, MS Russ 140.

Vladimir Nabokov Family Papers, circa 1920-2000. The collection contains 107 floppy disks belonging to Vladimir Nabokov’s son, Dmitri Nabokov. Houghton Library, MS Russ 140.

Born-digital backlog! Everyone has one. When you think of Houghton Library and other special collections, I’m sure that the first thing that comes to mind are old tomes, handwritten letters and other historical documents. So you may be surprised to know that Houghton is home to born-digital material. Floppy disks, USBs, external hard drives, Jaz drives mixed within unassuming archival collections forgotten, just waiting to be re-discovered by researchers. The papers of John Updike, the Vladimir Nabokov family and Jamaica Kincaid as well as the multimedia poem Fragments of Light. 6, represent twentieth-century and near contemporary holdings we definitely know to have born-digital materials, but these represent just a small fraction of Houghton’s collections. So, where are all the other born-digital materials hiding? Here at Houghton Library we have begun to tackle our born-digital backlog, in search of our hidden gems. In November 2017 the library formed its first Born-Digital team comprised of staff members Susan Pyzynski, Associate Librarian for Technical Services; Adrien Hilton, Head of the Manuscript Section; Melanie Wisner, Accessioning Archivist; and myself, Magdaline Lawhorn, Administrative Fellow & Project Archivist.

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Aspects of Edward Lear (Part II)

15 January 2018 one response ameze Research

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word backstories enters the language in 1982. But it would seem that Edward Lear invented the word over a century earlier (it appeared in his diary entry for 19 March 1876). The diaries themselves—a mixture of confession, bewilderment, recollection, and fantasy—contain a range of backstories that take us beyond the received, public image of Mr Lear as gently quirky, or inoffensively nonsensical, or merely pleasant to know. Biographers and researchers have drawn on the diaries (30 volumes of which survive, all housed at Houghton), and Marco Graziosi has provided invaluable transcriptions of some of them. A microfilm of the whole collection is now available online, and it offers a fresh opportunity to listen in as Lear talks to himself day by day, night by night, over three decades. ‘How wonderfully strange are my feelings!’, he exclaims. The more of the diary you read, the stranger things get.

Sometimes the diaries simply allow Lear to be enjoyably rude about friends and acquaintances behind their backs. Having dined with John Gould, he admits that he found him ‘less disgusting than sometimes – but he is always a hog’, and having been treated to a tune from a lady, he observes: ‘Mrs Alderson sung – sung? – the last rose of summer – & I had rather have had a tooth taken out . . . Fir the laaaa Roo,ooo,ooo,ooo,o,ooza saa – r’. Elsewhere, though, he touches on more ambiguously painful feelings. Thinking of two women who bring out particularly strong emotions in him, he scribbles down: ‘Wrote to Gussie Bethell: a long letter — but beside the mark: also to Emily Tennyson – much more besiderer: — but it is not possible to write as one would’. For Lear, the diary becomes a space to gesture towards the unwritable—and the unspeakable.

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Collections Now Available for Research: December 2017

8 December 2017 John Overholt Collections in Focus Now Available for Research

Houghton Library is pleased to announce that the following collections now have descriptive finding aids and are available for research in the library’s reading room.

Claudia Goreva and Ivan Kireef Photographs and Other Papers, circa 1902-1993 (MS Thr 1693) – processed by Magdaline Lawhorn

Hubert François Gravelot Drawings, 1738-1764 (MS Typ 404-MS Typ 404.2) – processed by Susan Wyssen

Fragments of Latin manuscripts, circa 1100-1540 – processed by Susan Wyssen

Phoebe Andrews Luther Theater Scrapbooks, circa 1881-1907 (MS Thr 1700) – processed by Magdaline Lawhorn

Paul Kahn Collection of Bezoar Materials (MS Am 3152) – processed by Melanie Wisner

Benjamin Rand Papers, circa 1873-1934 (MS Am 1082) – processed by Ashley Nary

Warren Family Correspondence of Missionaries Serving With the ABCFM in Japan, 1848-1984 (MS Am 3153) – processed by Melanie Wisner

Aspects of Edward Lear (Part I)

30 November 2017 one response ameze Uncategorized

Houghton Library at Harvard has an incomparable set of materials relating to Edward Lear—the largest, most diverse collection in the world: his natural history illustrations, thousands of landscape paintings, travel journals, diaries, letters, nonsense books and manuscripts, and personal documents including musical scores. This is the first of four blogs by Matthew Bevis, Professor of English Literature at Keble College, Oxford University, celebrating Lear’s work and exploring how Houghton’s collection can shed new light on his achievements. For a scrupulously-detailed checklist of the collection at Houghton, see Hope Mayo’s Appendix in the Harvard Library Bulletin, 22.2-3 (Summer-Fall 2011), 97-159.

‘How pleasant to know Mr. Lear!’ The pleasantry of one of the poet’s most famous lines also contains a wry smile at those who think they have got to the bottom of him. When Emily Tennyson told Lear that a certain Miss Cotton admired him, he replied: ‘Alack! For Miss Cotton! And all admirers. But we all know about the beautiful glass jar—which was only a white one after all, only there was blue water inside it.’ What we all know, then, is that we don’t always quite know what we’re admiring. Lear’s metaphor may be read in different ways: a person made of glass could be fragile or tough; maybe he’s less transparent than he seems; perhaps he only appears to be beautiful when he’s feeling ‘blue’; and so on. The poet was fascinated by the ways in which people are read (and misread), and by how beautiful surfaces conceal hidden depths.

Take his Old Person of Bar. Many of Lear’s limerick figures initially seem to be fantastical, nonsensical, other-worldly creatures, yet they are often being tacitly observed or judged by society. Houghton’s collection contains some revealing draft drawings for his nonsense books, including this one:

MS Typ. 55.1

There was an Old Person of Bar,

Who passed all her life in a jar,

Which she painted pea-green, to appear more serene,

That placid Old Person of Bar.

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On “On Pornography”

22 November 2017 Emilie Hardman Houghton Fellows

[page 3] Fault lines / Brion Gysin ; Keith Haring. EC95.G9995.986f

Here at Harvard we recently concluded Sex Week, an annual week of events focused on issues of sex, sexual health, sexuality, gender, gender identity, relationships, and more. In my capacity as 75^th Anniversary Fellow here at Houghton, I brought a Sex Week focus into my work with Houghton and examined the collection for materials related to the history of sexuality, from erotica and pornography in their many forms to academic and critical pieces on the topic. Sex is actually widely represented in the Houghton collection, and the materials I came across were a mix of the intellectually enticing and the bizarre. Looking through so much from so long ago, however, got me thinking about how different the experience of a 19th or early 20th century pornography consumer was from the way modern society perceives and uses pornography. As I was mulling over this, I came across a fascinating book review by none other than Gore Vidal. Titled “On Pornography,” it does much to analyze the way in which people interact with textual pornography in creative and collaborative ways, harnessing the imagination and weaving our own mental creations into the text to excite ourselves. That was, however, when I began to realize that this is not how most modern porn works anymore.

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