On September 8, 1827, the French printer-lithographer J. Cluis wrote to the members of the jury for the Exhibition of Industrial Products (“Exposition des produits de l’Industrie”) to present his invention of “autography” (“autographie”). Little is known about Cluis except that he was active as a printer-lithographer from the 1820s to the 1840s in Paris, Read More

Friends of Houghton Library will be pleased to learn that former Curator of Rare Books, Roger Eliot Stoddard, has presented to the Library a copy of his A Bibliographical Description of Books and Pamphlets of American Verse Printed from 1610 through 1820 published earlier this year by the Penn State University Press for the Bibliographical Read More

It’s the two-year anniversary of the online Special Collections Request Account system (Aeon) at Harvard! Aeon is being used many in Harvard special collections including those at the Fine Arts Library, Loeb Music Library, and Harvard-Yenching. Here at Houghton Library, the largest Aeon user at Harvard, we moved completely into the world of electronic requests Read More

Sometime in late 1926 William Faulkner wrote to publisher and fellow poet William Stanley Braithwaite for help. The Boston-based publisher of his first book of verse, The Marble Faun, owed him $81 in unpaid royalties. For months his letters to the Four Seas Company had gone unanswered, save for confirmation that his one certified letter Read More

Last week was orientation week at Harvard and Houghton was in high gear. Wednesday, Houghton joined the Archives and Special Collections table at Dudleyfest, the orientation fair for new Grad Students in Arts and Sciences. Thursday, Houghton participated in the Harvard College Library Freshman Open House hosted by Lamont Library. Reference Librarian James Capobianco introduced Read More