Modern Books and Manuscripts

The Modern Books and Manuscripts department is pleased to announce the acquisition of the Julio Mario Santo Domingo collection, comprising over 50,000 books, manuscripts, works of art, audio recordings and films, placed on long-term deposit at Harvard by the collector’s son, Julio Mario Santo Domingo III. The Santo Domingo Collection enriches and greatly expands the University’s research materials on psychoactive drugs and their physical and social effects—from cultivation and synthesis to the myriad cultural and counter-cultural products linked to altered states of mind.  Rich in scientific and medical works, it documents in depth both the benefits of controlled use and the horrors of addiction. The bulk of the collection, however, explores drug use by individuals and the influence such use and users had on their society, with emphasis on the 1800s and 1900s in America and France. Other areas in which the collection is particularly rich include erotica, French pulp publications, and materials documenting countercultural movements.

We’ll be featuring items from the collection regularly here on our blog, so check back often.

Swiss bibliophile Gérard Nordmann (1930-1992) made a lifelong avocation of collecting rare and obscure erotic works. Many of these are clandestine or anonymous publications, printed with false authors and imprints or none at all and often distributed to a private society of subscribers. Nordmann prided himself on collecting works, or versions of works, so rare that they didn’t appear in the catalog of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. His extraordinary collection went to auction in 2006, and Julio Santo Domingo purchased a number of its volumes; they are now at Harvard.

Tableaux des mœurs du temps dans les différents âges de la vie (1867), one such clandestine imprint, is attributed to the author Claude-Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon and to the publisher Auguste Poulet-Malassis. While this copy may not have the most lavish binding among those in Nordmann’s collection, the gilt-stamped satyrs on its cover (see top left) helpfully apprise the reader of its contents. The interior, though, is rather more interesting. In addition to the printed engravings originally illustrating the volume, a matching set of hand-colored engravings is included; better still, six engravings are accompanied by a hand-painted impression of the illustration, making for three versions total. The three renditions of one illustration are pictured above for comparison.

This extravagant extra-illustration continues with twelve aquarelles painted directly onto the text (left). Illustrations like these are likely to have been commissioned for the book by one of its former owners, rendering the copy genuinely unique.

Tableaux des mœurs du temps dans les différents âges de la vie. PQ1971.C6 A77 1867.

Thanks to Houghton rare book cataloger Ryan Wheeler, who is currently cataloging the books in the Santo Domingo library, for contributing this post. To find other material from this collection, search HOLLIS for “Julio Santo Domingo Collection.”

Please drop by Houghton to see our latest exhibition:  From Austen to Zola: Amy Lowell as a Collector opens today, and runs through January 12, 2013.

Amy Lowell – a controversial, cigar-smoking, outspoken, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet – collected works by prominent creative artists such as Jane Austen, Ludwig von Beethoven, William Blake, Charlotte Brontë, John Keats, Michelangelo, Walt Whitman and Émile Zola. A selection from the thousands of rare books and manuscripts collected by Lowell, and bequeathed to Harvard in 1925, are showcased in this exhibition.

Lowell was one of the few women competing in the male-dominated world of collecting. She began at age 17 by purchasing Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels with her Christmas money. The exhibition includes several works by William Blake, another of her early collecting interests, including Songs of Innocence (1789); a sketch by Michelangelo on the back of a work order (1523); letters by Voltaire, Jane Austen, and Harriet Beecher Stowe; love letters from Lord Nelson to Lady Hamilton, and John Keats to Fanny Brawne; manuscripts by Ben Jonson, Jean La Fontaine, Charlotte Brontë, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson; books owned by Charles I and the Empress Josephine; and much, much more.

The exhibition, on display in the Edison and Newman Room in Houghton Library, is free and open to the public during Houghton’s regular hours.

On August 20, 1940, Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky was attacked in his home in Coyoacán, Mexico. Trotsky was accosted in his study, where he was reading reports of the Battle of Britain in the newspaper.  His attacker, Ramon Mercader, bludgeoned Trotsky in the head with an ice axe; Trotsky died in a nearby hospital twenty-six hours later.

Adding to our extensive collection of Trotsky’s papers, we have recently acquired the copy of Ultimas Noticias de Excelsior that Trotsky was purportedly reading when he was attacked. The newspaper, spattered with blood, was retrieved by one of Trotsky’s guards, Henry Schnautz.

Images of the newspaper can be seen after the jump.

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This image of a skeleton kneeling on a book is part of a set of ten bookplates. They reproduce on silk prints by several eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century wood engravers, including Thomas Bewick (1753-1828). Other subjects depicted in the set include Aesop’s fable of the fox and the stork; a medal portrait of the mathematician Charles Hutton, for whom Bewick illustrated a number of books; and a hunting scene, which was a topic Bewick often illustrated. Some of these wood-engravings were first printed on paper. It is probable that not all were intended to be used as bookplates as eight bear no name.

These bookplates were in the private collection of Philip Hofer (1898-1984), founder and first Curator of the Printing and Graphic Arts Department at Houghton. Over his career as curator and book collector, Hofer had a number of bookplates made for his collection. He also collected depictions of the Dance of Death and one of his bookplates, made after a fifteenth-century woodcut, represented a winged skeleton with a bow and arrow.

Typ 805.21.2277. Collection of bookplates printed on silk, [ca. 1850?]. Bequest of Philip Hofer, 1984.

Thanks to Caroline Duroselle-Melish, Assistant Curator of Printing and Graphic Arts, for contributing this post.

The “Bookplate of the Week” series is on hiatus this week; for a bookplate related to this post, click here.

Work continues apace on our project to digitize the Dickinson family library. 59 books are now available to view through the Dickinson family library finding aid (click on the “Digital Content” tab at the top of the screen) and HOLLIS. On average, eight books are digitized each month.

Books containing marks of use have been prioritized; Dickinson family library books often contain pencil marks, dog-eared corners, and botanical specimens pressed between pages. Some examples of recently digitized volumes include:

Elegant extracts : a copious selection of instructive, moral, and entertaining passages, from the most eminent prose writers. Boston: Wells and Lilly, 1826. EDR 507.

The four extant volumes of this set are heavily marked, and include many dog-eared pages:

H.G. Ollendorf. Ollendorf’s new method of learning to read, write, and speak the German language… New York: Appleton, 1846. EDR 23.

Emily Dickinson’s German textbook, signed on the title page, with a note in German in her handwriting inserted, and some marks throughout:

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The Golden Legend. Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1852 [i.e. 1851]. EDR 286.

This volume of Longfellow’s poetry is heavily marked with vertical pencil lines in the margins.

While many books in the Dickinson family library contain marks of use, few contain actual annotations.  In the volume of Longfellow one reader (most likely Susan Huntington Dickinson, the poet’s sister-in-law, with whom she often shared books) wrote, “I don’t like this”.

For more information on the Dickinson collection at Houghton, see our website, and continue to follow this blog for updates.

If most books are collaborations, the Monuments of Moscow Antiquities (Памятники Московой Древности), issued in fascicles between 1842 and 1845, is an unusually instructive one, memorializing both Russian cultural life under Tsar Nicholas I (r. 1825-1855) and the state of printing in mid-19^th-century Moscow.

Although his name does not appear on the title-page, this work was the brainchild of Aleksei Olenin (1763-1843).  Olenin, an official of noble birth, was an artist, an archaeologist, and an ethnographer.  By the breadth and trend of his interests, he exemplified the intellectuals of his generation who sought a native Russian culture and a national past pre-dating the Europeanizing influence of Peter the Great.  Olenin secured the patronage of Nicholas I, who shared these interests and sought use them to strengthen the Russian state and Empire.  Olenin passionately desired to discover and preserve the artifacts of Russia’s past, and to document and publish them to the world.

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Grown-up collectors aren’t the only readers who use bookplates; many examples in our collection were designed for children.

Anna Ray Chatman (1900-1987) was born into a prominent Massachusetts family (her maternal grandfather was Oliver Ames, the governor of Massachusetts from 1887-1890, and Oakes Ames, a celebrated Harvard botanist, was her uncle). Her bookplate was designed by Gloucester, MA artist and frequent bookplate designer (and another uncle) Frederick Garrison Hall (1879-1946; Harvard Class of ’03) when Chatman was just four years old. Hall’s wife, Ariel, wrote, “Frederick Hall had no children of his own, but he was fortunate in having many nieces and nephews…Freddy was always “Uncle Fido” to these children and inspired and encouraged them.”*

*Elton Hall, Frederick Garrison Hall: Etchings, Bookplates, Designs. Boston: Boston Public Library, 1972.

Little is known of Pierre-Jacques Thiry (1769-1847), a maker of scientific instruments and native of Bergues, near the French-Flemish border, who created a folio-sized astronomical and astrological manuscript we’ve recently acquired.

Containing numerous illustrations, volvelles, charts and tables in Flemish and French, the manuscript chronicles the phases of the moon, the movement of the sun, and includes charts for calculating religious holidays and feast days.

While Thiry’s calculation of data was not in itself new, the value of the manuscript lies in the way it depicts popular iconographical representations of time from mid-19th century Flanders (the manuscript was most likely created between 1832 and 1850).

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Searching for something to feature for this week’s entry, I came across a volume titled Women Designers of Bookplates, just one of many extra-illustrated volumes of bookplates in the collection of Winward Prescott. Published in a limited edition in 1902, the book includes brief information on female bookplate designers of the period, reproduces a number of those plates, and leaves ample space for a collector to add his or her own. (Prescott did so, quite thoroughly).

Among the plates Prescott pasted into his copy were a handful designed by American artist and binding designer Olive Lathrop Grover. Below are both her own bookplate and one she designed for Mary K. Wheatland.

These and other bookplates in our collections can be accessed by contacting the Modern Books and Manuscripts department.

Émil August Göldi (1859-1917), whose colorful bookplate is this week’s feature,was a Swiss-Brazilian zoologist who discovered numerous species of Amazonian wildlife, and researched the causes and prevention of yellow fever. Following a successful research career, Goldi was tasked by the Brazilian government with the founding of a scientific museum in Pará, which still exists today.

Göldi’s bookplate, representing his background and various interests, is one of the few color bookplates in our collection.

This bookplate is part of the Daniel Butler Fearing collection at Houghton Library. Fearing collected several thousand bookplates related to angling, watercraft, and other related subjects. To access the bookplate collection at Houghton, email houghton_modern AT harvard.edu.

Unfortunately, it’s not always easy to find information on the collector whose bookplate we have. This is one such example: the striking woodcut plate of Frank E. Lane. Was he a book collector? A man who enjoyed rowing to a secluded spot to read and do a little fishing?

He was most likely Australian, as his bookplate was designed by Phillip Litchfield, a printmaker in Sydney active in the 1920s and 30s.

We might never know who he was, or why Litchfield was commissioned to design this plate – but if you have any ideas, please let us know!

This bookplate is part of the Daniel Butler Fearing collection at Houghton Library. Fearing collected several thousand bookplates related to angling, watercraft, and other related subjects. To access the bookplate collection at Houghton, email houghton_modern AT harvard.edu.

Most collectors might have just one bookplate for their entire collection. Rhode Island collector and merchant Daniel Butler Fearing (1859-1918) had a number of different bookplates for his many collections. This week’s plate is the one designed for Fearing’s collection of bookplates on watercraft:

This particular plate was designed by Boston artist Elisha Brown Bird (1868-1943), and may have been commissioned for a Grolier Club exhibition of Fearing’s collection just before his death.

Fearing’s bookplate collection now makes up a significant portion of the bookplate collection at Houghton Library. Along with bookplates on watercraft, Fearing also collected bookplates relating to angling, and heraldic bookplates with fish- and watercraft-related elements. His bookplate collection contains over 3,000 plates, along with numerous extra-illustrated volumes and reference works relating to bookplates.

Fearing gave more than bookplates to the library – his large collections of books on angling, fish, whaling, and related topics are also at Houghton.

Continuing with our theme of bookplates featuring animals from the southern hemisphere, this week we’ve chosen the bookplate of Rhode Island industrialist Rowland Gibson Hazard (1801-1888).

Hazard managed the Peace Dale Manufacturing Company in Peace Dale, RI, and served on the Rhode Island House of Representatives as well as on the Rhode Island Senate. He was a prominent abolitionist and social reformer, and was a friend of notable 19th century philosophers such as John Stuart Mill and the New England transcendentalists. He was also the author of a number of philosophical works and articles on public finance.

Despite how busy he must have been with his business and humanitarian pursuits, Hazard also found time to collect books. His bookplate, designed by Robert Cairns Dobson, refers to his philosophic interests, and also suggests that perhaps he was interested in Antarctic Exploration:

Or maybe he just thought that penguins carrying books were really cute.

Hazard’s papers are available in the Special Collections at the University of Rhode Island, the library of the Rhode Island Historical Society, and the Baker Library at Harvard Business School.

This bookplate is part of the Daniel Butler Fearing collection at Houghton Library. Fearing collected several thousand bookplates related to angling, watercraft, and other related subjects. To access the bookplate collection at Houghton, email houghton_modern AT harvard.edu.

We’ve decided to join the current trend of weekly series in special collections blogs and start one of our own, and so we proudly introduce the “Bookplate of the Week” series!

For nearly five years, student assistants in Modern Books & Manuscripts have been cataloging Houghton’s enormous and previously “hidden” collection of bookplates. Lists of the bookplates in the collection are not yet publicly available, but if you’re a bookplate enthusiast and and would like to examine the collection, send us an email at houghton_modern AT harvard DOT edu, and we can help you.

This week’s entry is the bookplate of Australian Sir John Alexander Ferguson (1881-1969), collector of Australiana and the author of the seven-volume Bibliography of Australia. Ferguson seems to have had a good sense of humor, evidenced by the design of his bookplate:

Ferguson’s bookplate was designed by Australian artist Lionel Lindsay in 1914. More information on Ferguson and his collecting can be found in the Australian Dictionary of Biography; his collection now resides in the National Library of Australia.

This bookplate is part of the Daniel Butler Fearing collection at Houghton Library. Fearing collected several thousand bookplates related to angling, ships, and other related subjects (look for more bookplates from his collection in upcoming posts.)

Two exhibitions, organized by the Modern department, are now on view at Houghton:

Louisa May Alcott: Family Life and Publishing Ventures

Curated by Joel Myerson and Daniel Sheely

April 2 – May 26, 2012

In May 1868, when beginning Little Women, Louisa May Alcott wrote, “Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters, but our queer plays and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt.” Surrounded by her parents and three sisters, Louisa May lived in a remarkable family, evidence of which lies in the voluminous letters and journals they left behind. Now on view in the Amy Lowell Room on the second floor of Houghton, this exhibition displays material relating to the Alcott family and the publication of Little Women.

Lyonel Feininger’s Early Photographs

March 12 – June 2, 2012

Already a highly-respected Expressionist painter, Bauhaus master Lyonel Feininger (1871-1956) acquired a Voigtländer Bergheil camera in 1928, and found the new medium inspired and enhanced his paintings. Coinciding with the exhibition “Lyonel Feininger: Photographs, 1928-1939,” on display at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, this exhibition offers a selection of Feininger’s early photographs, an album depicting the Feininger family’s favorite hobbies, and two of Feininger’s letters to his wife Julia. The exhibition is on display on the ground floor of Houghton Library.

Both exhibitions are free and open to the public during Houghton’s regular hours.

Images: (Top) Louisa May Alcott. Carte-de-visite, undated. Photographer unknown. Portrait file, bequest of Evert Jansen Wendell, 1918. (Bottom) Lyonel Feininger. (Untitled) Men’s shop with full-length dummies. Gelatin silver print, 1932. MS Ger 146.4 (479). Gift of T. Lux Feininger, 1987.

We’ve recently acquired a collection of 50 issues of 40 amateur newspapers, produced in the United States and Canada between 1882 and 1887.

Many of these papers appeared following the adoption in the 1860s of inexpensive hobby presses for use by amateur printers. Amateur newspaper societies fostered communication and exchange between the teenage proprieters, which resulted in similar examples from across the country. Each of the newspapers in this group are quite small in format, and most often cover subjects that might interest their creators and readers: puzzles, adventure fiction, news of local events, and advertisements for local businesses.  The collection contains examples from Boston…

greater New England…

the Midwest…

and California, among others:

*AC85.A100.882i. Purchased with the DeCuevas, Deknatel, Loring, Nordell, Rheault and Vershbow Fund, 2012.

If you prefer your Valentine’s Day imbued with a bit of tragic Romantic poetry, we have the perfect treat for you. The Modern Books and Manuscripts department at Houghton is pleased to announce a new online exhibition:

“I shall ever be your dearest love”: John Keats and Fanny Brawne

An expansion of a popular 2010 exhibition in Houghton’s Keats Room mounted in conjunction with the release of the film Bright Star, this exhibition focuses on Keats’s star-crossed love affair with Fanny Brawne, the girl next door. The exhibition features a number of Keats’s love letters to Brawne and manuscripts of Keats’s poems inspired by his passion for her, along with other items associated with the couple.

While reviewing issues of Scribner’s Monthly Illustrated Magazine which belonged to Emily Dickinson and her family, Modern Books & Manuscripts student assistant Anna Patel came across this page in the July 1879 issue:

The drawings, which appear in an installment of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel Haworth’s are, alas, unsigned, and whether they were made by a member of the Dickinson family or not remains a mystery. While many volumes in the Dickinson family library have marks of use, no other volume (of which we are aware) contains drawings such as these.

The Dickinsons subscribed to Scribner’s from its first issue in 1870. Its first editor, Josiah Gilbert Holland, was a family friend (a finding aid for the collection of correspondence between Emily Dickinson and the Hollands is available here).

EDR 545. Part of the Dickinson Family Library, purchased from Alfred Leete Hampson with funds given by Gilbert H. Montague, class of 1901, in happy memory of Amy Angell Collier Montague.

[Thanks to Anna Patel, student assistant in Modern Books and Manuscripts, for contributing this post]

Houghton Library has recently acquired an exciting collection of Parisian ephemera from the end of the 19^th century to the 20^th. The materials range from playbills for the Folies Bergère Music Hall to hotel-provided monument maps to exhibition handbooks. Among the many interesting items in the collection are guides to Paris specifically written for foreign soldiers, reflecting Paris’s history of occupation, both by allies and enemies.

The first guide for foreign soldiers in the collection is “The Story of Paris”, written by John H. Dennison in 1918 for U.S. soldiers (see image, right). The English-language pamphlets disappeared when the Germans took the city in the summer of 1940, and by December of that year German-language guides had emerged, like the “Deutscher Soldaten-Führer durch Paris” (see image, below).

However, it is the sole German guide in this collection, and by 1944 the “British Army Welfare Services Map of Paris” was printed on the back of a reclaimed German map, and the U.S. War Department published “The Pocket Guide to Paris and the Cities of Northern France” (see image, below).  Governments were not the only ones publishing for soldiers; shops soon caught on as well. In 1944 the department store Galeries Lafayette printed “Paris for Englishmen and Americans”.

A useful guidebook to the city, listing hotels, restaurants, and phrases, it is nothing like the pamphlet published in 1918 by Les Grands Magasins du Louvre, another department store, which dubs Englishmen and Americans “our brothers-in-arms” and begs them to “take good care not to forget the pleasant hours spent in the capital”.

b FC8.A100.873p. Printed ephemera concerning Paris (France), 1873-1973. Purchased with funds from the Anne E.P. Sever Bequest. A finding aid for the collection can be viewed here.

Images:

Top left: (96) War Department, Washington, D.C. Pocket Guide to Paris and the Cities of Northern France: pamphlet; maps, 1944.

Top right: (36) John H. Dennison. The Story of Paris: pamphlet; maps, 1918. A brief descriptive guide to points of interest in the city prepared by John H. Dennison [1870-1936] for the Use of the American Young Men’s Christian Assn. A E. F. and published for the use of American Soldiers and Sailors.

Middle: (94) Paris 1940: pamphlet; maps, 1940. German guide book, printed with the authorization of the Paris commandant, October 1940.

Bottom: (95) Deutscher Soldaten-Führer durch Paris: pamphlet; maps, 1940 December.

A new page has been added to the Modern Books & Manuscripts website to provide information on the recently-cataloged Houghton Library Science Fiction Collection. Cataloging of the collection was made possible by the Ruth Miller Memorial Philanthropic Fund.

The website includes information on how to locate and access materials within the collection, as well as a history of the collection.

Please contact the Modern department (houghton_modern AT harvard.edu) with any questions about the collection.

Image at left: Nathan Schachner, Space Lawyer (New York: Gnome Press, 1953), SF-1988.