In her formative years, the American poet Emily Dickinson’s interests centered on the study of voice and especially piano, for which she displayed considerable accomplishment and ambition. Her correspondence supplies the background for these activities while the contents of her music book provides a revealing perspective on just how assiduously and enthusiastically she collected, listened […]
[Thanks to Jean Jonassaint, Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Syracuse University, for contributing this guest post about a recently digitized Houghton item.] Although originally published in 1804 in Dessalines (then capital of Hayti), it is with their second edition by Saint-Remy (Paris, 1851), that Boisrond-Tonnerre’s Mémoires were passed on to posterity. Until […]
[Thanks to recent Houghton reader Derek Miller, a PhD candidate in Drama at Stanford University, for contributing this post.] Exploring the Harvard Theatre Collection’s rich trove of correspondence among nineteenth-century American theater managers and performers makes clear how small this community was. Letters in the HTC capture managers negotiating contracts for star performers, haggling over […]
[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 […]
[This post adapted from Kenneth Carpenter’s Reader’s Choice exhibition in the Houghton Library ] The largest component of Houghton Library’s notable bookplate collection was the gift of Winward Prescott, class of 1909. Prescott’s interest in bookplates was clearly lifelong, for as early as 1914 he published a bibliography of bookplate literature, which he revised and […]
