Writings on Special Collections and Archives at Harvard University's Houghton Library
No quadrilles, but more lobster sheet music. Here are two pieces for piano, once again featuring ladies in large hats (see previous post)
SHEET MUSIC 402
La petite coquette (the little flirt)
By John S. Zamecnik
1913
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items recently cataloged from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection.
Among recently-cataloged volumes in the Santo Domingo Collection is this small gathering of works by Sax Rohmer (1883-1959), an English novelist whose signal creation is the villainous crime lord Dr. Fu Manchu. Born Arthur Henry Ward, Rohmer published a handful of short stories before the first Fu Manchu book, The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu, catapulted him to literary success in 1913. He would ultimately write thirteen Fu Manchu books, which were variously adapted into film, radio, television, and comics, assuring the character’s status in the halls of fictional villainry.
“You have never experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.” At least that’s what Klingon chancellor Gorkon tells Spock in The Undiscovered Country, the last installment of the original Star Trek film series. Like self-serious English majors, Klingons quote the Earth-poet Shakespeare more than any other author—yes, sometimes even in their native tongue. Klingon warriors, however, aren’t the only faux-philosophe inhabitants of the Star Trek universe to use (and sometimes abuse) the Bard.
Trekkers have catalogued the franchise’s many allusions, plot borrowings, and recitations down to the minutest particle. What they may not know is that the Klingon’s mutant form was partly inspired by the humanoid Caliban from The Tempest. Costume designer Robert Fletcher (Harvard Class of ‘45) recounts the story in his recent memoir, A Trunk Full of Yak Hair or How the Klingons Got Their Look.
Designs for Caliban and Klingon captain. Robert Fletcher, ca. 2015. 2015MT-1
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items recently cataloged from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection.
True Detective Mysteries, called True Detective starting with its October 1939 issue, was a magazine about crime and criminals published for over 70 years. Beginning in 1924, it was often regarded as the first true crime magazine, launching the pulp magazine genre. It was jump started by American publisher Bernarr Macfadden , often labeled as an eccentric health enthusiast claimed to have buried part of his fortune in steel boxes across the United States.
Initially publishing fictionalized accounts of true crime, the magazine soon saw merit in reporting straightforward accounts of police investigation and the closing of particularly gruesome or sensational cases. This course of action was a hit, inspiring some 200 titles in the pre-World War II era, with True Detective itself reaching a circulation of two million. With our modern view of pulp as somewhat lurid, readers may be surprised to know that high end true crime magazines like True Detective initially turned away from hypersexualized crime stories, and were popular across the board, garnering support from J. Edgar Hoover himself.
In the post-war era, True Detective and its competitors moved further into the realm of the taboo, with stories becoming increasingly graphic both in language and the photographs used to illustrate them. At the height of the counterculture movement, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, True Detective joined its cohort in a new and extremely graphic focus on violent sexual crimes. Covers reflected what many remember of pulp today—terrified, nearly naked women often bound and gagged, fighting for their lives against shadowy criminals. These extremes did not hold reader interest, however, and by the 1980s this once booming genre was reduced to two publishers and eleven titles. Although interest in true crime did not wane during the 1980s and 1990s, the genre moved on to film and television, and True Detective ceased publication in 1996.
With true crime experiencing new popularity through podcasts such as Serial and television programming like Making a Murderer and The People vs. OJ Simpson, it is interesting to compare these new forms of investigation with their counterparts from nearly a century ago. Click here for a more detailed account of the rise and fall of True Detective magazine. To see inside more issues of True Detective and other pulp magazines, see the Pulp Magazine Archive hosted by the Internet Archive.
To learn more and see physical copies of True Detective, visit Widener’s collection: New York: Macfadden Publications, [1924-].
Thanks to Irina Rogova, Santo Domingo Library Assistant, for contributing this post.
Finding aids for two newly cataloged collections have been added to the OASIS database this month:
Processed by: Irina Klyagin
Tony Straiges set designs and models (MS Thr 1317)
Berkeley Sutcliffe costume designs (MS Thr 1323)