With one of this summer’s Pforzheimer fellowships came the opportunity for frequent trips to a remote corner of Houghton Library’s sub-basement level, where several hundred bound sheet music volumes lay waiting to be catalogued. Thanks to Dana Gee’s extraordinary work with the Hidden Collections Sheet Music project, tens of thousands of loose sheet music scores Read More

A sure-fire way to learn just how rare the books in a rare book library can be is to try documenting potential evidence of their existence.  Since May, I have scanned images of 164 books and pamphlets at Houghton.  The demands of the task required me to call for items in batches, instead of attempting Read More

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items recently cataloged from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Plantas que curan y plantas que matan written in Spanish by Arias Carbajal certainly makes a splashy impression with its pulpy cover.  The title translates to “plants that cure and plants that kill” and includes both theoretical and practical Read More

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items recently cataloged from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. In late summer 1968, delegates gathered in Chicago for the 35th Democratic National Convention. It had been a year of war, assassinations, and riots. The North Vietnamese launched the Tet offensive in January. Martin Luther King, Read More

A number of Houghton Library incunables—books printed using moveable type before 1501—were donated between 1955 and 1965 by Ward M. Canaday, member of the Harvard College class of 1907.  Several of those books were deposited in Houghton by Adriana R. Salem before being purchased by Canaday; Cambridge had been the end-point of Salem’s trans-Atlantic journey Read More