One of the highlights of our 2009 exhibition Harvard’s Lincoln was this early leaf of mathematics exercises in Abraham Lincoln’s hand. Now, two researchers at Illinois State University have announced confirmation that this Houghton item (MS Am 1326) is the long-separated 11th leaf of a “cyphering book” Lincoln prepared in 1825, at the age of Read More

Finding aids for six newly cataloged collections have added to the OASIS database this month, among them a number of Edward Lear collections, including the illustrations for his beloved “Nonsense” books.

[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 Read More

Houghton Library contains countless curiosities. Perhaps the most disturbing example is Arsène Houssaye’s Des destinées de l’ame (FC8.H8177.879dc), bound in human skin. In the mid-1880s, Houssaye (1815-1896) presented his recent book, a meditation on the soul and life after death, to his friend Dr. Ludovic Bouland (1839-1932), a noted medical doctor and prominent bibliophile. Bouland Read More

[Thanks to Renzo Baldasso, Oliver Duntze, and John Lancaster for contributing this collaborative post about a discovery made at Houghton, with additional assistance from Daniel De Simone, Eric White, and Robert Betteridge.] A recent discovery of facsimile leaves, printed on vellum in the 1560s to supply a lack in an incunable, nicely illustrates the benefits Read More