Modern Books and Manuscripts

We’ve recently acquired “The Star Trek Guide”, a photo-copied booklet distributed to the writers working on the original series of the television show.

The guide explains each character (Captain Kirk is described as “a space-age Horatio Hornblower”) and aspects of the show’s mythology, reviews available set and costume limitations:

…details the standard episode format:

… gives guidance on what situations would be inappropriate for the show:

(the answer is the fourth option: Concept weak)

…and offers fascinating insight into aspects such as budgets, inspiration and research for stories (call your local NASA office!), and recreational drug use:

f AC95.A100.967s. The Star Trek Guide. 1967. Purchased with the Roger Eliot Stoddard Book Fund, 2011.

Here’s an early Halloween “treat” for followers of the ongoing digitization of the Dickinson family library.  It’s been longer than we anticipated since the last digital book appeared, a pause caused by a switch in software in our imaging department.  Now, however, the bugs seem to be fixed, and we hope to resume a steadier rate of four to five books appearing every month.

This month focuses on George Eliot and the Brownings, authors whose work Emily Dickinson particularly enjoyed and admired, and whose influence on Dickinson is the subject of much current enquiry.  Additionally, we offer two books on the more “domestic” side: an almanac the poet mined for pictures, and a book on “practical subjects” given by a perhaps frustrated Edward Dickinson to his non-domestic daughter when she was 32.

Eliot, George, 1819-1880. Adam Bede. New York: Harper, 1860. EDR 512.  A Christmas gift from Susan to Emily.

Eliot, George, 1819-1880. The mill on the floss. New York: Harper, 1860. EDR 149. Emily Dickinson’s copy.

Eliot, George, 1819-1880. The Spanish gypsy: a poem.  Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1868. EDR 150.  Emily Dickinson’s copy.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 1806-1861. Aurora Leigh. New York; Boston: C. S. Francis & Co., 1857.  EDR 197. Susan Dickinson’s copy. (See one of the pages with pencilled marks in the margin, below)

Browning, Robert, 1812-1889. Dramatis personœ. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1864. EDR 239.  Susan Dickinson’s copy.

The New England primer improved: for the more easy attaining the true reading of English: to which is added The Assembly of Divines, and Mr. Cotton’s Catechism. Boston, printed by Edward Draper, at his Printing-office, in Newbury-Street, and sold by John Boyle in Marlborough-Street, 1777. Hartford, Conn.: Published and sold by Ira Webster, 1843 [i.e. 1850?] EDR 225  Another instance of Emily taking her scissors to one of her father’s books. (See the image above)

Sprague, William Buell, 1795-1876. Letters on practical subjects, to a daughter.  Albany: E.H. Pease, 1851. EDR 528.  Given by Edward Dickinson to his daughter in April 1862.

In 1862, Boston native and Union army officer Robert Gould Shaw took command of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment, the nation’s first all-black regiment. While leading the regiment, Shaw wrote several hundred letters to his parents, sisters, and wife, which constitute one of the main sources of information on the regiment from this period.

Shaw was killed in the second battle of Fort Wagner on July 18, 1863. He and the 54th Massachusetts soldiers are memorialized in a monument on Boston Common, and in the 1989 film “Glory,” which starred Matthew Broderick as Col. Shaw.

At some point in their history, Shaw’s letters were removed from the albums in which his family had mounted them.  This left scabs of mounting paper on most, which often obscured text; and the popularity of Shaw as a research topic over the years meant there were also numerous tears to be mended. Vicki Denby, Curatorial Assistant, assisted by Susi Barbarossa, Conservation Technician for Houghton Library; and Christopher Sokolowski, Project Paper Conservator, and Karen Walter, Senior Paper Conservation Technician of the Weissman Preservation Center, spent more than 90 days repairing the fragile documents.

Houghton’s large collection of Shaw’s letters to his family and other papers has now been fully digitized with funding provided by the Ruth Miller Memorial Philanthropic Fund, and is available to view through the collection’s finding aid.

Below: MS Am 1910 (14). [Notice of the death of Robert Gould Shaw]. MS. (unidentified author); Beaufort, 31 Jul 1863.

Below: Shaw to his father from St Helena, 4 July 1863.

MS Am 1910. Gift of Mrs. Lloyd K. Garrison, Mrs. Alexander D. Harvey, Frances Jay, and Mrs. Lawrence Fox, 1975.

Image at top left: Portrait file.

From the collection of Boston caricaturist David Claypoole Johnston (1798-1865), a few prototypes of some Civil War-era metamorphosis cards:

Pull the tab at the bottom, and Davis’s expression changes:

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This post was kindly contributed by Andrea Cawelti, Ward Project Music Cataloger at Houghton:

Pauline Garcia Viardot (1821-1910) was one of the 19^th century’s most versatile and influential opera stars.  Born into an operatic family (her father Manuel Garcia created the role of Almaviva in Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia, later becoming a renowned voice teacher; her sister Maria Malibran created the title role in Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda among others, and was famous for her temperament on and off the stage; her brother Manuel taught singing at the Paris Conservatory and went on to found his own school of singing based on his father’s, producing such pupils as Jenny Lind, Charles Santley, and Mathilde Marchesi) Viardot herself became a celebrated mezzo-soprano, composer, and voice teacher. Fervently admired by many composers including Meyerbeer and Gounod, Berlioz described her as one of the greatest artists in the history of music.  Viardot’s collaboration with Berlioz in revising Gluck’s Orphée for her voice was only one of many milestones in her singing career.  She was also a gifted composer, producing songs, chamber music, and operettas throughout her life.  Like her brother, Viardot also taught singing to great success.

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Today marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863). To honor Thackeray’s birth, Houghton Library is hosting the exhibition The Adventures of Thackeray in His Way Through the World: His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Family, on display from July 18 through October 15, 2011.

The exhibition includes manuscripts of Thackeray’s works and correspondence, sketches he drew of family and friends and for his publications, objects belonging to and associated with him, and many examples of his published works. Highlights include a manuscript portion of Vanity Fair, Thackeray’s favorite gold pen, Thackeray’s Horace from his schooldays at Charterhouse School, and many more.

On October 6, 2011, Houghton Library will host a one-day symposium on Thackeray and his life and work. Details and registration information can be found on the symposium website, http://hrvd.me/thackeray.

For more information on the exhibition or symposium, contact Heather Cole at  hgcole at fas.harvard.edu or 617.495.2449.

Christoph Irmscher, professor of English at Indiana University, and the guest curator of Houghton Library’s 2007 exhibition “Public Poet, Private Man: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at 200,” has contributed a post to the Library of America’s Reader’s Almanac blog on the tragic death of Longfellow’s wife Fanny Appleton Longfellow.

Image: *2001M-8. Houghton Library, Harvard University. Purchased with the Bayard Livingston Kilgour and Kate Gray Kilgour fund, the James Duncan Phillips Endowment fund, Books for Houghton fund, and unrestricted acquisitions funds.

“The Bible is an antique Volume – / Written by faded Men / At the suggestion of Holy Spectres -” (Fr 1577)

Was Emily Dickinson a religious person? She attended church services as a child, and the Dickinsons held daily religious observation in their home.  But she rejected the religious revivalism that was so prominent a feature of her adolescence, and at some point ceased to attend church services altogether: “Some keep the Sabbath going to church / I keep it staying at home” (Fr 236).

She did of course own a Bible—her father gave her one in 1844, when she was 13, and it is in the Dickinson Collection at Houghton Library (EDR 8).  Her poetry and her letters abound with direct and indirect references from the Bible.  She did not, however, consider her own Bible at all “sacred”–she cut verses out of its pages, folded down corners, and used it to press flowers. Pictured below is a page from Psalms, with the vivid blue flower that was originally pressed there:

Dickinson’s Bible is now available online, part of a larger project to make the Dickinson Collection more easily available to those not physically here in Cambridge, as well as protecting this and other fragile volumes from the damaging effects of frequent consultation.  New digitized volumes are added on an irregular basis—keep an eye on this blog for information on new additions.  Next to appear with be the Dickinson family’s eight-volume set of Shakespeare.

For a complete list of the contents of the Dickinson family library, see the finding aid here. For more information on the Dickinson collection at Houghton Library, visit our website.

For many years, early John Updike manuscripts—the gift of the author during his lifetime—have been available to researchers in the Houghton Reading Room.  When the remainder of the archive was purchased from the author’s estate in 2009, this early portion remained open for research while the newly acquired material was off-limits until cataloged.

Processing of the 2009 purchase continues apace.  The time has come to integrate the early material into the larger archive.  As of June 1, access to all of John Updike’s papers is closed until the entire collection has been processed. We anticipate processing to be completed in the summer of 2012.

Readers may access books from John Updike’s library in the Houghton Library reading room. For information on access, please visit Houghton Library’s website.

Continue to check our blog for announcements relating to the collection. Please feel free to contact the Modern Books and Manuscripts department with any questions by email, houghton_modern AT harvard.edu, or by phone at 617.495.2449.

If you were unable to join us last week for A. Kingsley Porter University Professor Helen Vendler’s talk, titled “Emily Dickinson and the Sublime,” an audio recording is now available to stream here:  http://hcl.harvard.edu/libraries/houghto…

And be sure to join our weekly Houghton Library tour, Fridays at 2 PM, to view the Emily Dickinson Room and a small exhibition of Dickinson’s manuscripts relating to Professor Vendler’s talk.

You are cordially invited to

Emily Dickinson and the Sublime

A talk by Helen Vendler, Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor, Harvard University; and author of Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries (2010)

31 March 2011

5.30 P.M.

Edison and Newman Room

Houghton Library, Harvard University

Admission is free, and open to the public.

Space is limited.

Sponsored by

Houghton Library, Harvard College Library

The Woodberry Poetry Room;

and Harvard University Press

37 audio tapes from the Solidarity Collection, an archive of Poland’s “Solidarność” independent trade union movement in the 1970s and 1980s, have recently been digitized. Andrea Bohlman, a doctoral candidate in Historical Musicology in the Harvard University Department of Music, contributed a post on the tapes to the blog of the Loeb Music Library, available here:  http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/loebmusic/2011/03/16/polish-solidarity-tapes-digitized/

While unprocessed, the materials in the Solidarity Collection, including the digitized audio files, may be accessed in the Houghton Library reading room with the call number *2009M-97r.

Several months ago, Assistant Curator of Early Modern Books and Manuscripts John Overholt was in the Houghton stacks when he happened upon a brown paper-wrapped package tied with twine. We soon discovered that the package contained previously unknown photographs of Spanish fortifications Havana, from 1899 or 1900. The photographs were sent to the photo conservators at the Weissman Preservation Center. Photograph conservator Elena Bulat contributed this post.

A box with folded and stacked photographs arrived to the Weissman Preservation Center from Houghton Library for treatment.  The photographs were composite panoramas of Havana and envelopes with identifying information and one paper document containing information about the project.  It was clear from the beginning that this project posed several challenges for us.

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The Houghton Library’s Dickinson Collection holds one of only two authenticated portraits of Emily Dickinson: the 1840 Otis Allen Bullard portrait of the three Dickinson children. Ten-year-old Emily is depicted holding a rose and a book illustrated with flowers, indicating her early interest in gardening and nature; Lavinia holds a drawing of a cat (unlike her older sister, who preferred dogs, Lavinia was a lifelong cat lover).  That cat, however, has always been difficult to see, as it was partially obscured by the painting’s frame.

A need to reprint the Houghton postcard of this iconic image led to a decision to re-photograph the portrait without its frame, in order to see the entirety of the canvas.  The back of the painting was also photographed.  The digital photography was done in the Harvard College Library Imaging Services studio.  The color reproduction is more faithful to the original than in the older (scanned) color transparency; and indeed one now sees the seven-year-old Lavinia’s beloved cat more clearly.

http://ids.lib.harvard.edu/ids/view/23152304?buttons=y [front]

http://ids.lib.harvard.edu/ids/view/23152305?buttons=y [back]

The portrait of the Dickinson children is on display in the Houghton Library Emily Dickinson Room, which can be visited during Houghton’s weekly tours. Reproduction of Bullard’s portrait requires the department’s permission.

Just in time for the holiday, we’ve acquired a collection of nearly 40 hand-drawn valentines. Most likely all the work of one artist, the valentines were probably created in the UK between 1850 and 1860. The practice of exchanging paper valentines was popularized in the early 19th century, and mass-produced valentines were made available by the late 1840s. Manuscript valentines most likely continued to appear along with their print counterparts, but few examples from this period survive.

Some take the form of more traditional valentines, and feature flowers, happy couples, and romantic verses. The one to the left reads “Fresh from the spring of affection.”

Others offer more comic sentiments, illustrated with exaggerated images of the characters described in acerbic verse (these were known as ‘cruel’ or ‘vinegar’ valentines). A few have moveable parts, including the one pictured at right, which features an older woman beating a younger man (if the tab on the bottom is pulled, her arm, holding the birch, moves up and down).

The verse reads, “You nasty and ugly and crabbed old scold/ I shall pity your husband, poor man!/ If e’er you inveigle one into your snare/ which you doubtless will if you can./ But I will not marry a vixin [sic] like you/ So do not hope me, to ensnare/ Who know if I wed you we should not/ Be a very affectionate pair.”

Many of the cards are tailored towards members of a specific profession. If your valentine is, for instance, a butcher, you might send him this token of your affection:

The verse reads, “Dearest loved one of my heart/ From thee, I never will depart/ Altho’ you are a butcher born/ And go for many days unshorn.”

MS Eng 1666. Houghton Library, Harvard University. Purchased with the Frank Brewer Bemis Bequest, 2011.

“Charles Olson, 1910-1970: a Centennial Selection from the Ralph Maud Collection,” on exhibit in Houghton Library’s Chaucer case (on the ground floor) since November 3, will be extended through February 7.  The exhibition celebrates both the centennial of the birth of this influential American poet, and the 2009 gift to the Houghton of the Ralph Maud collection of Charles Olson.

Charles Olson greatly influenced his contemporaries through his poetry, his essays, and his teaching during the 1950s at the innovative arts school Black Mountain College. His ties to New England were many and deep. Olson was born and raised in Worcester, Massachusetts, and spent summer vacations in the coastal town of Gloucester, Mass. He earned a B.A. and an M.A. from Connecticut’s Wesleyan University, taught at Clark University in Worcester, and was enrolled in the doctoral program in American Studies at Harvard. He settled in Gloucester in 1957, following the dissolution of Black Mountain College, and lived there for the rest of his life. His major work, The Maximus poems, while wide-ranging in content, directly concerns the town of Gloucester, its geography, its history, and its relationship to the poem’s narrator, Maximus.

The Ralph Maud collection of about 200 items represents a near-complete collection of Olson’s publications.  It includes first editions and selected later editions of his major works and first appearances of many of his poems in literary magazines of the 1950s and 1960s, some of which were ephemeral and are quite rare today.  Ralph Maud received his B.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard. He is a distinguished Olson scholar and biographer, and was a friend of Charles Olson.

This post was contributed by Houghton Library Rare Book Cataloger (and cataloger of the Olson collection) Elaine Shiner.

Images:

Above: Cover of Charles Olson Reading at Berkeley. f AC95.Oℓ843.966c.

Right: Design by Nikola Cernovich.  Created to accompany This, a poem by Charles Olson. Black Mountain, NC: Black Mountain College Graphics Workshop, 1952. AB95.Oℓ843.952t

Below:  Canyon de Chelly, by Charles Olson. Published by Simon Fraser University and the Chax Press for the Charles Olson Centenary Conference, June 4-6, 2010, Simon Fraser University. AB95.Oℓ843.2010c

The summer of 2010 saw the debut of the department’s Dickinson portal, one-stop shopping for those who want to discover Dickinson-related resources at Harvard.  The portal announced the beginning of a project to digitize books in the Dickinson Family Library, to provide wider access to these often-fragile volumes. Three new titles have just been added, bring the total to six:

• EDR 445 Dana, Charles Anderson, 1819-1897, ed. The household book of poetry…sixth edition. New York & London, 1860.  http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/21564366

• EDR 566 Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870. The old curiosity shop, and other tales… Philadelphia, 1842. http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/21566047

• EDR 523 Milton, John, 1608-1674. Paradise lost… Philadelphia, 1819.http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/21567348

The books in the Dickinson Family Library exhibit a variety of marks of use: corners folded; entire pages folded vertically; underlinings; vertical marks in the margins; small x-es; and, very occasionally, cut-outs.

Here is an example of the latter, from chapter 54 of Dickens’s  Master Humphrey’s Clock (in EDR 566): http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/2156…

Dickinson attached this illustration, with another cut from page 359, to a poem she sent her sister-in-law Susan around 1859:

Interestingly, the book bears the ownership inscription of the poet’s father, Edward Dickinson; if the dating of the poem is correct, his daughter felt free to cut snippets from his books while he was around to discover her biblio-vandalism. Or perhaps the poet knew he wouldn’t be reading a novel?

To browse the digital Dickinson Family Library quickly, go to the finding aid for the collection and click on the tab “Digital Content.”  New volumes are added on an irregular basis, but will be announced here.  Next to appear: Emily Dickinson’s Bible (EDR 8)!

A list of print items in the Modern Books and Manuscripts department accessioned from July 2009 through June 2010 can now be viewed online here:

 http://tinyurl.com/3aahave

Accessions included books from the John Updike Book Archive, a complete collection of the publications of Argentine writer Juan Filloy, and many others.

Books found in the list linked above may be requested for use in the Houghton reading room using our new online registration and request system, Aeon, or by clicking on “Request item” in an item record in HOLLIS or HOLLIS Classic.

The book portion of the John Updike Archive is now cataloged and available for research use.

The 1,635 volumes establish Updike as his own greatest collector. For example, the collection includes roughly ninety editions and printings of Rabbit, Run, including those in translation. Many of these volumes bear Updike’s annotations, which not only correct typographical errors and emend the text, but also zero in on aesthetic discordances such as flattened margins and faded or ink-heavy printing. Nor was Updike always satisfied with a single round of corrections: in a 2004 printing of Pigeon Feathers, he edits the 1961 story “A&P” for its inclusion in a new anthology. His changes rearrange the checkout aisles in the titular store.

More extensive annotation, and an occasional window into Updike’s own writing process, can be found in the volumes he reviewed and criticized. The manuscript text of the poem “Mass. Mental Health” covers the rear endpaper of Updike’s copy of The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1910-1913; and in M. Ageyev’s Novel with Cocaine, which Updike reviewed for the New Yorker in 1986, there is a brief sketch of the plot and characters of S., published two years later.

The collection ranges from mass-market paperbacks to letterpress broadsides, but several items are rarer still. A publisher’s dummy for a book titled Travels of Frank Folly, and illustrated by Warren Chappell, suggests a storybook for children or young adults, but the title was never published (see image, right). And to commemorate Updike’s fiftieth book, the essay collection More Matter, his longtime publisher A.A. Knopf produced a special edition of one, exclusively for the author. Laid inside the brown leather slipcase is a menu for the private luncheon at which the volume was presented (see images, above left and below left).

The collection also includes the books on Updike’s writing desk at the time of his death, those he needed close at hand while writing his last, unpublished novel.

As a thorough catalog of Updike’s published work, from Fawcett reprints of The Witches of Eastwick to Swedish and Estonian translations of The Centaur, the collection serves as a portrait both of the author’s prolific career and of book publishing in the latter half of the twentieth century.  Through the generosity of the John Updike Literary Trust and Knopf, the collection continues to grow with the addition of posthumous editions.

All titles are included in HOLLIS, the Harvard online catalog, located at this link. Under the ‘Other call number’ search type, search for AC95.Up174 to see all titles in the collection. For a direct link to the collection in HOLLIS, click here.

This post was contributed by Houghton Library Bibliographic Assistant Ryan Wheeler, who cataloged the books and other print materials in the John Updike Archive.

Images, from top:  More Matter, *AC95.Up174M9.1999 (B); Travels of Frank Folly, *AC95.Up174T2.1999; Luncheon menu, *AC95.Up174M9.1999 (B). 

Signature from Emily Dickinson. Note and poems sent to Susan Dickinson, [early 1862] MS Am 1118.5 (B44). Gift, Gilbert H. Montague, 1950.

Houghton Library’s holdings of American poet Emily Dickinson include some 700 autograph poems, including 40 fascicles; some 300 letters; close to 600 books that might have been read by the poet; and furniture and objects, including the writing desk and chair from her bedroom at the Homestead—all material that descended by inheritance from Martha Dickinson Bianchi to Alfred Hampson, from whom it was purchased by Gilbert Montague, Harvard Class of 1901, in 1950, and given to Houghton Library.

The “Dickinson Collection”, however, is not monolithic; it consists of a number of smaller collections, some of which actually predate Montague’s gift to Harvard.  If one goes to OASIS (the Harvard finding aids database) and browses for collections listed under “Dickinson”, one finds 15 separate collections—and then one needs to add in the various Bianchi, Higginson, and other collections.

To facilitate navigation of these many collections, and to offer information on the their history, as well as access, permissions, and other resources, we’ve recently mounted a new “portal” to all things Dickinson at Houghton, available here:  http://hcl.harvard.edu/libraries/houghton/collections/modern/dickinson.cfm

We hope the new site will make the Dickinson collections more easily navigable; we welcome any questions or comments by email, houghton_modern AT harvard DOT edu.