Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), best known for his novels Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, spent the final four years of his life on his estate near the village of Vailima in Samoa. Over the course of these years, he wrote 45 letters to his dear friend Read More

Sherlockians have long recognized the wisdom and practical utility of the “Sacred Writings,” the four novels and fifty-six stories that comprise the Sherlock Holmes canon. This letter from Baker Street Irregulars founder Christopher Morley (1890-1957) to Edgar W. Smith (1894-1960), a vice-president of the General Motors Export Company and prominent Baker Street Irregular, illustrates a Read More

Grief overcame members of the Twenty-eighth Congregational Society of Boston as Deacon Samuel Joseph May read aloud a letter from their ailing minister, the Unitarian abolitionist Theodore Parker: “I shall not speak to you to-day; for this morning, a little after four o’clock, I had a slight attack of bleeding in the lungs or throat.” Read More

Finding aids for 11 newly cataloged collections have been added to the OASIS database this month, including photos of burlesque performers and the papers of Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

More recently digitized items at Houghton include “whimsical exuberances too tedious to mention” (…like the satirical broadside from which that line comes…), stunningly colored Dürer woodcuts, letters and postcards from Marina Tsvetaeva, a letter from Rembrant, the Olney hymns manuscript,  an 18th century Italian work on fortifications with illustrations by Prince Raimondo di Sangro Sansevero, Read More