Houghton Library Blog

Scandale!

26 January 2017 adharris Collections in Focus

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring recently cataloged items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection.

Originally a French lawyer, Georges Anquetil was also a journalist and publisher who was well known for unorthodox methods and anarchist leanings. Early in his legal career he wrote under the name “Georges Evil.” His career in journalism began at the French Mail around 1914 after he was disbarred. After that he tried to launch various newspapers over the years mostly focusing on political satire though he was not very successful except for Le Grand Guignol, which ran for about eight years. We have an issue from 1925 in the collection where the cover appears to give their opinion of where various types of Evian water originate. Any type of scandal, especially political, was Anquetil’s bread and butter for Le Grand Guignol.

This appetite for scandal was also true for most of Anquetil’s self publishing endeavors. One that we discovered in the collection is La maitresse légitime : essai sur le mariage polygamique de demain. It loosely translates to Legitimate Mistress : Essay on polygamous marriage tomorrow which was essentially an attack on monogamy. It was hugely controversial and consequently sold a lot of copies.

Another scandalous book deeply rooted in satire was Satan conduit le bal : roman pamphlétaire et philosophique des moeurs du temps which reads as Satan leads the ball. It is set in France during the early 20th-century during the government of Poincare where Anquetil’s criticism spares no from socialist to nationalist. He associates the names of prominent French figures with extreme scenes of debauchery in order to indicate that France was being led to ruin by those that governed it. Georges Clemenceau, an early French prime minister is described as a “whoremonger” who brought victory in WWI and prostitution. Antonin Dubost, president of the Senate, is found dead in a notorious brothel in which he was a regular customer, supposedly poisoned by police. All three of these publications can be found in Widener’s collection.

Le grand guignol. Paris : Hachette.

La maitresse légitime : essai sur le mariage polygamique de demain. Georges-Anquetil ; préface de Victor Margueritte. Paris : Les Editions Georges-Anquetil, 1926.

Satan conduit le bal : roman pamphlétaire et philosophique des moeurs du temps / Georges Anquetil. Paris : Les Editions Georges-Anquetil, 1925.

Thanks to Alison Harris, Santo Domingo Project Manager, for contributing this post.

Artistry of Linocuts

12 January 2017 adharris Collections in Focus

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring recently cataloged items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection.

This lovely artist book Geheimzinnige Personen : omtrent de flarden des levenswas was created by a Dutch artist, Margit Willems. It loosely translates to Mysterious Persons: on the scraps of life and features 23 linocuts with text on separate pages. You might be asking yourself what exactly is a linocut? It is a printmaking technique that takes a linoleum sheet, often mounted on a wooden block, which is then used as a relief surface. The artist uses tools to cut into the surface of the linoleum so that the uncarved areas will reveal a mirror image of the parts to show when printed. Essentially the cut away areas will be white and the remaining area will be black on the linocut.

One of the early strong innovators in printmaking (including linocuts), book design, typography and illustration was Czech émigré Vojtěch Preissig. Preissig came to America around 1910 where he taught at Colombia University and then the School of Printing and Graphic Arts at the Wentworth Institute here in Boston. While he was at Wentworth Preissig designed recruitment posters for the United States during WWI that were aimed at Czech immigrants.

Most of Willem’s linocuts do not use a great deal of color in this book, but when it is used it has a strong impact. Her linocut that depicts an elderly woman who was robbed in Tubbergen (thus giving up her pincode) is an example of that. You can see that she created the linocut as well as the typeset letters in black ink. Then she reused the typeset numbers inverted them and printed them with red ink. It creates a striking image and also displays the skill of the artist in creating the image through several different (often laborious) steps.

Geheimzinnige Personen : omtrent de flarden des levens can be found in collection of the Fine Arts Library.

Thanks to Donna Viscuglia, Cataloger and Alison Harris, Santo Domingo Project Manager, for contributing this post.

Tags: artist books, Dutch artist, Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection, linocuts

Climbing that career ladder

11 January 2017 Cawelti Collections in Focus Uncategorized

Ah, patronage. That special arrangement, in which a composer or author contacts someone in High Places, and asks them to lend their name (and/or their money) to a publication. No less a luminary then Blackadder has struggled with its complexities. Scholars today are particularly interested in those little dedications often found at the head of title pages, as researchers can follow the rise and fall of careers based on the social standing of their patrons (among other interesting details of cultural history). Today I’ve been cataloging some of the music found during our recent Pforzheimer project, and one particular volume caught my eye. At first glance, it appeared to be five separate pieces of music, each printed on different-colored paper, bound together with some random lithograph portraits. Years of experience with our Aladdin’s cave of wonders however, has taught me to be highly suspicious of first glances.

Abelinde Rae

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Washington the Great, Chief of the Columbians

10 January 2017 3 responses Cawelti Collections in Focus

Alfred the Great drove the invading Danes out of England and coins from his reign dub him “King of the English” in tribute to this victory. In the centuries following his death, he gained a reputation as the monarch who did much to create not only the new nation of England, but also the mythology that nurtured its national identity. The Harvard Theatre Collection owns a play about King Alfred with a surprising connection to George Washington and American history, a connection noted during the cataloging process which will make this resource discoverable for researchers.

TS 2026.30 front flyleaf. Note the ownership initials F. H. — could this refer to Francis Hopkinson?

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John Adams on Shakespeare, or As You Dislike It

6 January 2017 Dale Stinchcomb Collections in Focus

Another year of Shakespeare has drawn to a close. This week on Broadway the curtain came down on the hit show Something Rotten! whose song “I Hate Shakespeare” offered the closest thing to a respite from the past year’s tempest of fulsome tributes. Those weary of the much ado can take heart: the next anniversary won’t come around until 2039, when Stratford’s favorite son turns 475.

Over the din of universal praise, the Bard’s detractors seldom get much airtime. Houghton’s own exhibition last spring, Shakespeare: His Collected Works, somehow managed nods to poet-playwrights John Dryden and William D’Avenant while playing down the artistic quarrel between Shakespeare and his adaptors that overspread much of the eighteenth century. Mea culpa.

Instead the exhibition highlighted just one contrarian: President John Adams, whose complaint was hardly artistic. He objected on moral grounds, laying out his argument in a disapproving letter to a young, ambitious, and I daresay, unsuspecting, playwright.

By 1822 Samuel B.H. Judah had two plays mounted at the Park Theatre in New York with indifferent success. A third, dramatizing events at the Battle of Lexington, was to be performed on Independence Day. Perhaps in light of these patriotic stirrings, Judah presumptuously sent to both Adams and Thomas Jefferson copies of his newly published dramatic poem Odofriede, compelled, he wrote, by its favorable reception “in some of the first cities in our country.”

It was a shameless exaggeration.

AC8.J8802.822o, Houghton Library.

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Tags: criticism, Shakespeare, Shakespeare: His Collected Works