Modern Books and Manuscripts

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection.   Le Aventures de Fido Caniche by surrealist artist Valentine Hugo, is an intricately detailed picture book that follows a dream sequence of Fido, an innocent, inquisitive poodle.  In the dream Fido visits other exotic animals including a […]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. One very unique book by celebrated German-American artist Peter Max, Paper Airplane Book, showcases both his artistic talent as well as his playful attitude towards his work.  Entirely consisting of templates for paper planes, each sporting bright colors […]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. With the advent of smartphones and wifi everywhere, travel guidebooks seem like a thing of the past. Back in the late 19th century though, they might have been the only way to find your way around. The guidebook […]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection.   The comic strip Krazy Kat by George Herriman ran for 31 years in the New York Evening Journal and follows a cast of animal characters set in a highly stylized Arizona home.  Although not popular among the […]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. This particular item which I believe is an artists’ book is quite interesting, published in Paris in 1990 by Ed. Rouleau Libre it was issued as a matchbox measuring 8 x 6 cm and contains a number of […]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection.   Although much of the Santo Domingo Collection focuses on illegal and medical drugs, there is some exceptions to these books that suggest other ways of getting that feeling.  Alex J. Packer, Ph.D., an educator and administrator in […]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Andrés Rábago, also known as OPS or El Roto, is a Spanish cartoonist who focused on social satire and critiques of current events.   In his book of cartoons, Mitos, Ritos y Delitos en el Pais de Silencio, Rábago […]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Newspaper comic strips illuminate society in a way many other mediums cannot.  Available on a daily basis, one can track changing trends in cultures by looking at the types of comic humor that was popular at the time.   […]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Robert Sabbag’s semi-biographical Snowblind, first published in 1976, tells the story of Zachary Swan, a 1970s cocaine smuggler who relied on scams and ruses to move drugs past customs officials and keep himself out of harm’s way in […]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Written in 1938, Bell Wood-Comstock’s Plain Facts for Young Women on Marijuana, Narcotics, Liquor and Tobacco offers advice for those ladies whose goal is to get married and settle down with children.  Wood-Comstock wrote several books on advice […]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. In his book High Tide, Brad Johannsen really brings Herman Hesse and Lao Tzu’s writing to life with colorful and psychedelic illustrations.  The book contains the story ‘Piktor’s Metamorphasis,” a spiritual tale telling of loneliness after Piktor has […]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. The term “devil’s picture books” was used by the Puritans to refer to playing cards in hopes that it would prevent people from using them.  In the book by the same name, Mrs. John King Van Rensselaer gives a […]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection.   There are many spin-offs of Sherlock Holmes, and some excellent ones from the early 20th century are Jean Ray’s Harry Dickson, le Sherlock Holmes Americain.   This series of pulp dime-novel’s originally started in Germany 1907 and continued […]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo collection. By the controversial nature of its subject areas, the Santo Domingo Collection naturally includes a wealth of banned, censored, or otherwise suppressed literature. Ronge-maille vainqueur, a text by the French novelist Lucien Descaves and illustrated by […]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Witches have always fascinated people, from the magical tales of Merlin to the Salem Witch trials, to the current trend of magic and vampires in popular culture.  Written by Colin Wilson and illustrated by Una Woodruff, Witches is […]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Sometimes you come across something so gruesome that even though you want to look away, you can’t.  Le Musée des Supplices certainly fits that description.  A book that gives the history of torture written by Roland Villeneuve, a […]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection.   A surprising discovery when opening up the book Predicting the Future: An Illustrated History and Guide to the Techniques is who the author is.  Although not a particularly famous person, Albert, S. Lyons is a surgeon.  His […]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo collection. Today’s feature is Etidorhpa, or The end of the earth, a fantastical novel by pharmacologist John Uri Lloyd, written in the hollow-earth mold of Jules Verne’s Journey to the center of the earth. The title is, as observant […]

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Now on display in the Theodore Roosevelt Gallery, located in the lower level of Lamont Library in Harvard Yard, are selections from the photographic series Theodore Roosevelt – “How I Love Sagamore Hill” by New York artist Xiomáro. Xiomáro was commissioned by the National Park service to photograph the interiors of the president’s “Summer White House” […]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection.   The Day-Glo Designer’s Guide offers insights into the way that Day-Glo colors have been used in both art and advertising. Although Day-Glo is common today, the process wasn’t discovered until 1934 by Robert and Joseph Spitzer. While […]

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