Modern Books and Manuscripts

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. This recently-cataloged volume from the Santo Domingo Collection appears to be an unexceptional 1932 printing of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland: the book’s illustrated covers have faded, and its acidic paper stock has gone from white to tan. […]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection.   Les Très Riches Heures du Cannabis is a cannabis lovers must have. Full of colorful illustrations and advice, this book has everything you need to know and more. From descriptions and step by step instructions on how […]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Newly represented among the authors in the Santo Domingo Collection is the showman and author P.T. Barnum. Shown here is an 1866 copy of Barnum’s survey/memoir The humbugs of the world, translated into French as Les blagues de […]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Among the occupations on Victor Segalen’s multifarious résumé are French naval doctor, anthropologist, ethnographer, literary critic, linguist, and poet. The latter most concerns us here: pictured is Segalen’s Stèles, a collection of prose poems presented as translations of […]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. A particularly sumptuous volume from the collection of Gérard Nordmann is today’s Santo Domingo Collection feature. This 1938 publication of Poèmes inédits (Unpublished poems) by Pierre Louÿs was limited to 109 numbered copies; this is copy 5. Louÿs […]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Today from the Santo Domingo Collection, we have a handsomely designed volume: this edition of La main enchantée (The enchanted hand), a fantasy story by the French author and poet Gérard Labrunie, who wrote under the pen name […]

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We are very pleased to announce the launch of the Emily Dickinson Archive, http://edickinson.org, an open-access site that brings together nearly all of Emily Dickinson’s extant poetry manuscripts. A collaborative effort across many institutions, the resource provides readers with images of manuscripts held in multiple libraries and archives, and also offers an array of transcriptions […]

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This past spring, Houghton Library collaborated with the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst and the North Bennet Street School in Boston to create exact reproductions of the writing desk and bureau originally in Emily Dickinson’s bedroom in the Homestead. Since 1950, the two iconic pieces have been part of the Emily Dickinson Collection at the […]

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In her formative years, the American poet Emily Dickinson’s interests centered on the study of voice and especially piano, for which she displayed considerable accomplishment and ambition. Her correspondence supplies the background for these activities while the contents of her music book provides a revealing perspective on just how assiduously and enthusiastically she collected, listened […]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. The Santo Domingo collection is broad in scope, but its many volumes also accommodate exhaustive collecting of a number of particular authors. Among these is David Gascoyne (1916-2001), the British poet and translator known for his association with […]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Today from the Santo Domingo Collection, a curiosity: Scènes d’alcoolisme, a series of transparencies printed on glassine paper and published by Libraire Larousse, depicting the ravages of alcoholism. Included with the sheet of transparencies are a sheet of […]

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[Thanks to Houghton patron Scott Guthery for contributing this guest post.] In putting together a story of mathematics in post-colonial America – in particular mathematics as found outside of colleges and universities – I found Google’s digitization of Harvard’s copy of Mathematical Tables by Solomon P. Miles and Thomas Sherman, the third stereotype edition of 1842 published […]

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The Mississippi newspaper shown here came to Houghton Library from the 1957 bequest of Lee Max Friedman (1871-1957), a prominent scholar of Jewish-American history. Established July 9th, 1868 and offering weekly coverage of the presidential election, The Corinth Caucasian is neither listed in American Newspapers 1821-1936, nor in a 1942 union list of Mississippi newspapers […]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. The novelist and music-hall performer Colette (1873-1954; full name Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette) is known both for her literary work – principally the novel Gigi – and her love affairs with men, women, and in one case, her own stepson. […]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Maurice Barrès (1893-1923) was a French novelist, journalist, and political ideologue who aligned himself with the anti-Semitic French nationalist movement of his period. Besides novels and political works, Barrès also produced several books of travel writing, including this […]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. The French poet and novelist Edmond Haraucourt began his career with a volume of poems, La légende des sexes: poëmes hystériques, first published in 1882. The poems were controversial for their time, and Haraucourt published under the pseudonym […]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. The infamous erotic novel Histoire d’O has featured in this space before, but this version is striking enough to warrant revisiting: a 40-centimeter large-format edition of 350 numbered copies published by Cercle du Livre Précieux in 1962, eight […]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Propos d’un intoxiqué, Jules Boissière’s 1896 chronicle of opium use and dissipation in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, receives a lavish reissue in 1929. A limited edition of 97 copies, the book is designed with a motif of bamboo […]

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For over five years, student assistants in the Modern Books & Manuscripts department have diligently cataloged and scanned thousands of bookplates from Houghton’s collections. Compiled primarily by collector Daniel Butler Fearing (Harvard 1882), the bookplate collection is organized roughly by subject, which include Fearing’s favorite collecting topics, fish and watercraft. The groups of bookplates that […]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. This week we feature a copy of Les petites alliées, by the French novelist Claude Farrère and published in this edition by Éditions de l’Intermédiaire du Bibliophile in 1927. While Farrère’s popularity has declined in the half-century since […]

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