Finding aids for six newly cataloged collections, and a preliminary box list for one recent acquisition, were added to the OASIS database this month, including papers of Timothy Leary, theatrical ephemera, and the records of two 19th-century volunteer fire departments.

Shortly after March 12, 1872, the architect Henry Hobson Richardson (1838-1886) received a letter, signed by George Minot Dexter and Charles Henry Parker on behalf of the Building Committee, inviting him to enter a competition to design a new church building for Trinity Church in Boston. Though terse and factual in formulation, the letter led Read More

Dedicated collectors gather materials in many different ways: they may buy a single specific work; they may acquire a “box of stuff” which they know includes one or more items they want as well as other materials which don’t interest them. Occasionally they even buy unseen an entire collection from someone who was known to Read More

The Shakespeare authorship question, now over 160 years old, continues to generate books, conferences, lectures, debates, films, websites, and even blog posts; a lot of people continue to doubt that William Shakespeare the actor actually wrote the plays attributed to him. The controversy itself has become a worthy subject of study, interesting for its longevity, Read More

Today, Houghton Library observes the anniversary of John Milton Ward’s passing. Ward, a Harvard musicologist who turned to extensive collecting in his retirement, donated a “Magnificent Collection” of performing arts material to us over the course of many years before his death in 2011. One of his favorite areas of study was the world of Read More