Posted in Houghton Library on Nov 11th, 2014 Comments Off on Crowley and the Beast
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. The Santo Domingo Collection continues to bolster Harvard’s library of works by author and occult leader Aleister Crowley. These range from substantive books on magic to pamphlets containing individual poems (one of these, titled “Tyrol”, is a condemnation of […]
Posted in Houghton Library on Oct 28th, 2014 Comments Off on Demons and devils
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Though outnumbered by books on drugs and sexuality, the Santo Domingo Collection’s occult works are nonetheless considerable in number. Featured today are two early works on demonology, one by a French political philosopher and statesman, and the other by […]
Posted in Houghton Library on Oct 23rd, 2014 Comments Off on Happy Birthday, Emily Dickinson Archive!
Launched on October 23, 2013, the Emily Dickinson Archive (EDA) celebrates its first year of operation today, during Open Access Week. The site received 1.2 million “hits” from poetry lovers in its first 10 days; after a year, monthly usage averages 10,000 visits and 377,000 page views per month. About 80% of visitors are from […]
Posted in Houghton Library on Oct 16th, 2014 Comments Off on A poet, killer, thief, brawler, and vagabond….
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Francois Villon was all of those things, and most prominently a subversive outsider. At a time when most poetic works were strongly religious or allegorical Villon wrote with honesty about love and sex, drinking, money problems, […]
Posted in Countway Library, Harvard Medical School, Harvard Botany Libraries, Houghton Library on Oct 2nd, 2014 Comments Off on Three times as nice
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. We are lucky to have found three first editions of Traité du chanvre in different bindings as we continue to unpack and catalog items from Santo Domingo boxes. From left to right the images reflect the covers of these […]
Posted in Houghton Library on Sep 2nd, 2014 Comments Off on Burroughs in pulp
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo collection. William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) looms large among countercultural figures of 20th-century literature. The seminal Naked lunch is a famous source of controversy – it was banned in Boston in 1962, and ultimately redeemed in a 1966 obscenity trial before […]
Posted in Houghton Library on Sep 1st, 2014 Comments Off on Jogging, macramé and mug trees: A ‘70s flashback
This week’s post on Harvard College Library’s zines collection looks at Part Two of a publication entitled It’s a wonderful lifestyle: A seventies flashback published in 1993. In the words of author Candi Strecker, the publication is an “encyclopedic examination” of American popular culture in the 1970s, and judging by the range of topics covered […]
Posted in Houghton Library on Jul 28th, 2014 Comments Off on “The staff of Happy Temps Inc. goes straight to HELL!”
This week’s post on Harvard College Library’s zines collection focuses on a topic most zines have something to say about: work. Whether it is to bemoan (or celebrate) the lack of employment, announce a new job, or, as is most often the case, complain about an existing job, work is an almost ubiquitous topic in […]
Posted in Houghton Library on Jul 24th, 2014 Comments Off on T-shirts and Trades: Aspects of Zine Publishing
This week’s post on Harvard College Library’s zines collection delves a little deeper into how zines are produced, circulated and reviewed. While a previous post on the collection talked about how science fiction fanzines circulated in the ‘80s through the “APAs” (amateur press alliances), this post focuses on how the zines of the ‘90s and […]
Posted in Houghton Library on Jul 22nd, 2014 Comments Off on Lasciviousness, libel, and letters
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. As the French Revolution erupted in 1789, the bourgeoisie took up a variety of arms against the aristocracy; among them was literature. Pictured here from the Santo Domingo Collection is La Messaline françoise, a libelous account, published under […]
Posted in Houghton Library on Jul 16th, 2014 Comments Off on The Justice for Janitors movement and the photonovela
Part of the ongoing project to catalogue Harvard College Library’s zines collection involves sorting out non-zine material, such as flyers, books, catalogues and, as featured in this week’s post, photonovelas. La Gran Limpieza/ The Big Sweep is a 1993 bilingual photonovela about the struggles of the Justice for Janitors movement in Los Angeles published by […]
Posted in Houghton Library on Jul 11th, 2014 1 Comment »
Cataloguing work is continuing on Harvard College Library’s zines collection. The latest zines to be listed are the so-called “APA” (amateur press alliance) fanzines published during the 1980s. APAs are networks set up by people who wish to discuss a common interest in a single forum. While the first APA in the United States – […]
Posted in Houghton Library on Jul 8th, 2014 Comments Off on The Jimi Hendrix Bibliographic Experience
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. This week’s feature is the second of two sculptural volumes: in this case, the binding itself, rather than the enclosure, defies convention. The book, a paperback French biography of Jimi Hendrix published in 1976, is unremarkable in itself. However, […]
Posted in Houghton Library on Jun 30th, 2014 3 Comments »
In Bruce the Psychic Guy Magazine (Vol. V, No.1, 1994) editor Bruce Lewis includes a satire by Ed Hill on how the scientific wonders of the atomic age will transform the average homeowner’s future. The piece is called “War …is Home Improvement!” and it focuses on two war-time developments: computers and atomic energy.
Posted in Houghton Library on Jun 27th, 2014 1 Comment »
Grade ‘D’ but edible is a zine authored by Marko and Ms. Chiff. The two issues found so far in Harvard College Library’s zines collection tell of their extended travels in southeast Asia and India, and their life on an organic farm in Tennessee. Through them both the authors share their views of the world. […]
Posted in Houghton Library on Jun 24th, 2014 Comments Off on Cork, resin, and rope
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. In the course of these posts on the Santo Domingo Collection, numerous fine, extravagant, and perhaps even ostentatious bindings and enclosures have been showcased. This week, we bring you the first of two books that extend past the codex […]
Posted in Houghton Library on Jun 16th, 2014 8 Comments »
Cataloging work has begun on Harvard College Library’s recently acquired 20,000-strong zines collection. Zines are non-commercial, non-professional and small-circulation publications that their creators produce, publish and either trade or sell themselves. The 600 or so zine titles listed thus far are best described as an eclectic collection of material whose subject matter ranges from personal […]
Posted in Houghton Library on Jun 10th, 2014 2 Comments »
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Cataloging work is now underway on the complete bibliography of author, psychologist, countercultural guru, and erstwhile Harvard lecturer Timothy Leary. The Leary volumes in the Santo Domingo Collection were previously the collection of Michael Horowitz, Leary’s associate and bibliographer. […]
Posted in Houghton Library on May 13th, 2014 Comments Off on Ludlow’s Hasheesh Eater
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. The Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library, founded in San Francisco in 1970 and formed from the libraries of several private collectors, was a preeminent collection of drug-related literature. Upon its closure, it was acquired by Julio Santo Domingo, […]
Posted in Houghton Library on Apr 29th, 2014 2 Comments »
Alma Hirsig’s My life in a love cult.
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