Houghton Library Blog

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the exhibition Open House 75: Houghton Staff Select on display in the Edison and Newman Room from May 8 – August 19, 2017.

Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, Plate I: Typus Orbum Terrarum, 1570. NC5.Or850.570tℓ

First published in 1570, the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum is generally regarded as the first modern atlas, being a comprehensive suite of maps derived from empirical observations and issued together as a single work. Edited and published by the Flemish geographer Abraham Ortelius (1527-1598), with plates engraved by Frans Hogenberg, the Theatrum was a great success, going through over twenty-five editions in various languages. With each edition, new maps were added, and old ones altered or replaced as further European “voyages of discovery” filled in the expanses once designated terra incognita. The world map shown here is derived from earlier maps by Giacomo Gastaldi and others. Note, among many other erroneous features, the inclusion of the fictitious north Atlantic island of Friesland and the enormous southern continent of Terra Australis. Buyers of the atlas could choose either a plain, uncolored version, or with the maps colored by hand, as in this copy from the 1574 Latin edition (Ortelius himself had started out as a map colorist, and for many years employed his sister Anne in this capacity).

With so many variations in edition, issue, and state, atlases like the Theatrum are notoriously complex to collate and describe, which I suppose is part of the appeal they hold for me as a book cataloger. On a more personal level, I have an affinity for Belgian things, having lived for some time in Antwerp, and, before joining the librarian profession I worked for a rare book dealer who specialized in atlases, so my interest in Ortelius is sentimental as well as academic. This particular copy, however, will always have special significance to me. Donated to Houghton and duly assigned an accession number in 1950, this treasure of a book was somehow never cataloged until 2013, when, in the course of some unrelated errand in the stacks, I happened to identify it. It was a thrilling find, a day at Houghton I will always remember, and when the call went out for staff to contribute to the exhibition Open House 75, I knew at once what to choose.

Noah Sheola, Bibliographic Assistant, Houghton Library, contributed this post.

In the fall of 2016, the major exhibition Beyond Words: Illuminated Manuscripts in Boston Collections dazzled the press and the public alike. Divided across three venues, 260 medieval and Renaissance manuscripts and early printed books from nineteen Boston-area collections shone on gorgeous display. It was the largest exhibition of its kind ever held in North America and was attended by almost 52,000 visitors across the three sites: Houghton Library, Boston College’s McMullen Museum of Art and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Researchers gathered for a three-day symposium based on the artifacts; the public was welcomed to a number of hands-on events and lectures; and a luxurious print catalog was produced with full-color plates and contributions from 83 scholars. The exhibition was featured in the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal, and the Huffington Post.

Along with all of this remarkable effort, the curators also created a digital catalog on the website for the exhibit, beyondwords2016.org. Since the final exhibit shuttered in January, the site has languished. It represents, however, a remarkable resource for researchers, teachers, and hobbyists. As a Harvard Library Pforzheimer Fellow this summer, my task is to update the digital catalog. In my first week here, I focused on making sure that all 249 entries had a thumbnail image­—I added more than 75 images!–and fixing or adding links to additional digital images. While this has resulted in a more functional website, much remains to be done.

We plan to upload descriptions and bibliography for the manuscripts, and eventually to add the print catalog write-ups to the digital entries. We hope to work with our web developer to improve search engine optimization and make the website more user-friendly. All of this will help Beyond Words continue to be a model of collaboration and sharing of information in the scholarly community and, well, beyond. Stay tuned for further developments!

Hannah Weaver, Harvard Library Pforzheimer Fellow and Ph.D. Candidate in Romance Languages and Literatures, contributed this post.

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the exhibition Open House 75: Houghton Staff Select on display in the Edison and Newman Room from May 8 – August 19, 2017.

The British Romantic poet Lord Byron (1788-1824) followed up his successful Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812) with a series of popular Oriental Tales, inspired in part by his early adventures in the Levant.  He composed and revised the third of these tales, The Corsair (1814), in just one month, and the first edition sold an unprecedented 10,000 copies on its day of publication.  Already a lion in London literary circles, Byron was out-of-town when his jubilant publisher John Murray wrote, “I really think that I may venture to congratulate your Lordship upon the Publication of a Poem wch has set up your fame beyond all assailment – You have no notion of the sensation which it has occasioned and my only regret that you were not present to witness it.”  Popular demand called for eight further editions in quick succession, bringing the total circulation of The Corsair to 25,000 copies through 1815.

The Corsair reached an even wider audience through several contemporary melodramatic adaptations, in prose or written for the stage.  One such prose adaptation was Conrad and Medora; or, The Pirate’s Isle (ca. 1814), a chapbook printed and sold by Dean and Munday, a London firm that specialized in cheap editions of popular literature intended to reach the masses.  The edition featured a crudely hand-colored frontispiece illustrating the dramatic moment when the pirate Conrad discovers “the lifeless body of his beloved Medora” after his long absence:

He snatch’d the lamp – its light will answer all –

It quits his grasp, expiring in the fall.

Frontispiece, Conrad and Medora (London, ca. 1814)                                       *44W-1217 – Gift of W. B. O. Field, 1944

In 1819 Murray was contemplating his own illustrated edition of Byron’s works.  He commissioned the painter and book illustrator Richard Westall (1765-1836) to create a new suite of images to accompany several poems, including The Corsair.  (Six years earlier, Westall had captured the world-weary poet at the height of his fame in an oil portrait now held by the National Portrait Gallery.)  When Byron in Italy received a set of Westall’s steel-engraved illustrations, he signaled his approval in a letter to Murray: “the brush has beat the poetry.”

Lord Byron, Works, v. 3 (London, 1821)                                                     *EC8.B9968.B821w2 – Amy Lowell fund, 1964

For Open House 75, I selected an illuminated 1826 edition of The Corsair, bound in black velvet and printed on vellum in an edition of no more than two or three copies by the Societá Tipografica dei Classici Italiani in Milan.  The illuminator, Giambattista Gigola (1769-1841), received his artistic training in France and is best known for exquisite miniatures achieved in a neo-classical style.  For The Corsair, he produced a brilliant frontispiece after Westall’s 1813 portrait of Byron and nine full-page illuminations heightened in gold leaf to accompany the text, each within an intricate border; the artist also provided six ornate headpieces and three tailpieces.

Lord Byron, The Corsair (Milan, 1826)                                                                                          Typ 825.26.2527 – Bequest of Philip Hofer, 1984

I first came upon this magnificent example of “European Britannica” (translations of English literature and books about England published on the continent) in the bequest of Philip Hofer, the founding curator of the library’s Printing and Graphic Arts Department.  In the late 1980s and early 1990s I had the privilege of cataloging a substantial part of the Hofer bequest under the direction of my colleague Dennis Marnon.  As an erstwhile Byron collector, I find it somewhat paradoxical that this deluxe Milanese edition of The Corsair and the more homely Conrad and Medora chapbook are today equally unobtainable, each surviving in only a few copies.  The triptych of images in this post is intended to suggest a broader range of visual resources available at Houghton Library to those interested in Romantic era book illustration.

Thanks to Peter X. Accardo, Programs Coordinator, for contributing this post.

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the exhibition Open House 75: Houghton Staff Select on display in the Edison and Newman Room from May 8 – August 19, 2017.

In the fall of 1954 Tennessee Williams was desperate for a hit. After the meteoric successes of The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire came one respectable showing and two abject commercial failures. It was with this in mind that he presented a new script to Elia Kazan, who had directed both the lauded Streetcar and the critically decimated box office flop Camino Real.

The raw power of Cat on A Hot Tin Roof called to Kazan, but he played coy. He was eager to direct, but only if he could convince Williams to make significant changes that to his mind would ensure a success. After the experimental Camino, he wanted a more traditional story structure, with character development and resolution. Early drafts offered a protagonist in Brick who, aside from a couple of notable outbursts of emotion, spent the play in a drunken lethargy. Whatever trajectory Brick was on in the first two acts, there was no further character development in the final act, which also relegated one of the most dynamic characters of the play, Big Daddy, offstage and mute. (more…)