Author Stephen O. Saxe will give this year’s Philip and Frances Hofer Lecture on April 20, 2010, at 5:30 pm, in Houghton’s Edison and Newman Room. The talk is entitled “Turning Lead into Gold: Nineteenth-Century American Type Foundries and Their Specimen Books” and is free and open to the public. From a shaky beginning in Read More

[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 Read More

The Harvard Theatre Collection, part of Houghton Library, has been enriched in thousands of ways by the collecting zeal of William Powell Mason Professor of Music Emeritus John M. Ward and the late Ruth Neils Ward.  Professor Ward is developing collections which reflect the uses of music in opera, ballet and social dance;  his collection Read More

Thomas Hollis is much on our collective mind these days.  Houghton Library has recently published “From the Great Desire of Promoting Learning”: Thomas Hollis’s Gifts to the Harvard College Library by William H. Bond, Librarian of Houghton Library from 1965 until 1982.  Bond’s checklist documents Hollis’s donations and illuminates his goal in spreading the political Read More

What do John Keats’s Shakespeare, Wordsworth’s library catalog, and Victor Hugo’s commonplace book have in common with primers and spellers and other historical materials on learning to read?  Each item is among the 1,200 books and manuscripts–comprising more than 250,000 web-accessible pages–now discoverable online in Reading: Harvard Views of Readers, Readership, and Reading History. Developed Read More