Houghton Library Blog

With one of this summer’s Pforzheimer fellowships came the opportunity for frequent trips to a remote corner of Houghton Library’s sub-basement level, where several hundred bound sheet music volumes lay waiting to be catalogued. Thanks to Dana Gee’s extraordinary work with the Hidden Collections Sheet Music project, tens of thousands of loose sheet music scores in the Theatre Collection have received preliminary identification and categorization. Bound sheet music volumes were next in line for attention, as their contents were not yet recorded beyond place of publication and genre. (For a general sense of the collection’s scope, see Kathryn Lowerre, “Some Uncataloged Musical Resources in the Harvard Theatre Collection with a Handlist for the Bound Music Volumes,” Notes 2006 Vol.62(3)).

An amateur musician in the nineteenth century could have sent his or her library of loose sheet music to a book binder for any number of reasons. Perhaps the owner wanted to display his or her wealth in an expensive, fancy binding. Maybe a mother intended to pass on her collected musical library to a daughter. Or, there simply might have been too much clutter on top of the piano.

Bound volumes in the collection which belonged to Edith Forbes Perkins, seven identified to date.

(more…)

A sure-fire way to learn just how rare the books in a rare book library can be is to try documenting potential evidence of their existence.  Since May, I have scanned images of 164 books and pamphlets at Houghton.  The demands of the task required me to call for items in batches, instead of attempting to gather all the target books at once.  When I wasn’t working on other projects or requesting anywhere between 10 and 20 books, I ventured to Houghton’s conveniently large overhead scanner to capture images.  I sought title pages, colophons, and anything else that appeared to hold clues about the book’s content and printing information.  Occasionally, I may have overestimated the number of images needed, but I thought, “Better safe than sorry.”  After all, I wasn’t collecting information for myself, but for someone else.

At a first glance, a great number of these books had languages in common: Spanish, Portuguese, and sometimes Latin.  However, I also came across a book printed in Hebrew (Heb 2000.79), the only one of its kind from my long list.  Equally varied were the subjects, which spanned works related to agriculture (Typ 560.63.450) and colonialist ventures in Mexico (SA 3404.5).  There were books discussing Catholic-Protestant relations in Ireland (Br 11920.21) and showcasing variations in script (TypW 532.94.225).

Title page from Promtuarium variarum scripturarum, ca. 1594. TypW 532.94.225

My quest later led me to a peculiar sammelband (SC6.A100.B650a) containing many pamphlets, printed and manuscript, bound together; I scanned images for 33 of those works.  The most common works appear to be treatises on prayer, theology, and religious history: one such book is Typ 560.21.867, whose title page boasts one of the few, if not the only colored woodcut of the bunch.  What links all of these books together is their significance to the Iberian Books project based at University College Dublin in Ireland.

Title page from Flos sanctorū, ca. 1521. Typ 560.21.867

According to the main Iberian Books webpage, the project aims to “produce a foundational listing of all books published in Spain, Portugal and the New World or printed elsewhere in Spanish or Portuguese during the Golden Age, 1472-1700.”  Books are classified according to the availability of surviving copies and the bibliographic evidence of their existence.  I have scanned images of books that not only meet the criteria (in particular, those printed in 1472–1650), but that may also be unique copies.  From the project staff’s perspective, there is currently a lack of substantial evidence that these items exist.  Scans could help confirm whether the books truly exist or whether their records were inadvertently produced.  If a copy of a book exists only at Houghton, it may become all the more important to the library’s efforts to strengthen the visibility of its holdings.  The insight that book could provide readers of the present and future can be preserved, rather than lost to the ages.

Alicia Bowling is a rising senior at Smith College and a summer intern in Early Books and Manuscripts.

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

Plantas que curan y plantas que matan written in Spanish by Arias Carbajal certainly makes a splashy impression with its pulpy cover.  The title translates to “plants that cure and plants that kill” and includes both theoretical and practical information regarding medical botany for curing various diseases.  In one section I discovered hierba de los gatos or catnip.  The text counsels that it can be used for nerves, headache, suppression of menstruation, scurvy, and people suffering from general weakness (whatever that means).

Since the 1700s catnip tea has been used for many mild ailments including nervous conditions, stomachaches, hives, and even the common cold.  More familiar with catnip as a stimulant for actual cats I was curious if people today still use catnip for any of these ailments.  I discovered that people still brew up catnip tea though there appears to be little hard scientific evidence that these problems are being cured by the catnip.  During the 1960s it was apparently smoked for the euphoric effects many claimed to experience and most people agree that it can be a good insect repellent when used in an oil form.  

On the other end of the spectrum we have the very poisonous tartago or spurge.  Native to southern Europe, northwest Africa, and throughout most of Asia the seeds, flowers, leaves, and roots are all poisonous and because the plant produces latex it can cause skin irritation when handled.  One animal that appears to be immune to the toxin from spurge are goats who sometimes eat it.  But watch out if you are going to milk your goat because the toxin can still be passed along in the goat’s milk!

Plantas que curan y plantas que matan :tratado teórico práctico de botánica medicinal para la curación de todas las enfermedades /por el Prof. Pio Arias-Carbajal, ex-medico de S.M. Mexico : [publisher not identified], [date of publication not identified] can be found at the Botany Libraries.

Thanks to Alison Harris, Santo Domingo Project Manager, Gretchen Wade, Judith Warnement, and Chris Robson of the Botany Libraries for contributing to this post.

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

In late summer 1968, delegates gathered in Chicago for the 35th Democratic National Convention. It had been a year of war, assassinations, and riots. The North Vietnamese launched the Tet offensive in January. Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered in April, sparking riots in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Chicago. Andy Warhol was shot and Robert Kennedy was killed in June. Mayor Richard J. Daley was determined to show a strong force against the protesters flowing into Chicago. In addition to more than 10,000 policemen, he enlisted the aid of some 15,000 Army troops and National Guardsmen. This force clashed with protesters on the streets and in parks outside the convention, sparking five days of violence that overshadowed the contentious convention.
(more…)

A number of Houghton Library incunables—books printed using moveable type before 1501—were donated between 1955 and 1965 by Ward M. Canaday, member of the Harvard College class of 1907.  Several of those books were deposited in Houghton by Adriana R. Salem before being purchased by Canaday; Cambridge had been the end-point of Salem’s trans-Atlantic journey from France (Walsh 5: 43).  Salem’s father was Federico Gentili di Giuseppe (Walsh 5: 43), whose name is more commonly associated with the restitution of paintings held by the Louvre Museum to his heirs in 1999 (Parisot 265).

Booklplates of Adriana R. Salem and Harvard College Library from Inc 3380.10

(more…)