On October 12th, noted biographer Lyndall Gordon will speak at Houghton Library. Her talk, “‘Abyss has no biographer’: Can we risk the Abyss?” will focus on her recently published biography of Emily Dickinson, Lives like loaded guns: Emily Dickinson and her family’s feuds (2010). The book has stirred some controversy by proposing that the poet Read More
James Capobianco
New Special Collections Request Accounts
Today, Houghton Library introduces a new special collections request system that allows patrons to register and place requests for materials online. This system replaces paper registration and paper forms to request materials to use in the library, and because it will eventually be HCL-wide, will eliminate the need for patrons to register separately at each Read More
The Sertenas Group: Printers and Publishers, Paris, 1540-1570
[This post written by Christopher H. Walker, a member of the cataloging faculty at Penn State University Libraries, and a Katherine F. Pantzer Jr. Fellow, 2010] The fact that French publishers of the mid-16th century formed partnerships to share printing expenses and co-distribute books is well known; but the shifting membership of these project-based partnerships Read More
Etruschi
[This post was written by Craig Eliason, Katherine F. Pantzer Jr. Fellow, 2010] The history of printing types is full of confusing labels for the varied letterform designs that have emerged over the centuries. The complicated nomenclature devised for what are now most commonly called sans-serif types is a case in point. Sans-serif letters, as Read More
London Theater Music during the First Decade of the Eighteenth Century
[This post adapted from Dr. Kathryn Lowerre’s Reader’s Choice exhibition in the Houghton Library] Music was an integral part of the lively London theater world of the beginning of the eighteenth century. In late 1700, noble subscribers underwrote a competition offering cash prizes for the composer whose setting of poet and playwright William Congreve’s The Read More