Modern Books and Manuscripts

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Books in the Santo Domingo collection are predominantly in English and French, per the collecting habits of Julio Mario Santo Domingo himself. Today we have an exception to this rule: Sexuální nocturno, by the avant-garde Czech author Vítězslav […]

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This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Today’s volume, an 1860 edition of Baudelaire’s Les paradis artificiels: opium et haschisch, is handsomely appointed in navy morocco and marbled paper boards, with a matching suede-lined slipcase. It bears the bookplates of the French writer Maxime Du […]

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This post is part of  an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. This week, we have a book whose ownership can be traced back three generations: first to the Santo Domingo family; then to Gérard Nordmann, from whose estate the Santo Domingos purchased it; and finally to René Bonnel, publisher […]

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This post is part of  an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. The Marquis de Sade, author and provocateur, spent the end of his life imprisoned for having produced, among other works, Justine, ou, Les malheurs de la vertu. This copy from the Santo Domingo Collection, formerly owned by Gérard […]

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This post is part of  an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Continuing with the Gérard Nordmann holdings within the Santo Domingo collection, we have this copy of L’École des biches, ou, Mœurs des petites dames de ce temps. Attributed to a small handful of authors, published anonymously for a […]

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Funding from the Ruth Miller Memorial Philanthropic Fund enabled Houghton to catalog a collection of American broadsides this summer.  In a spectacularly productive two-month period, graduate student Agnes Coakley cataloged 770 broadsides, making them readily available to readers for the first time.

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This post is part of  an ongoing series featuring items from the newly-acquired Santo Domingo collection. We have another item from Gérard Nordmann’s collection this week. Guy de Maupassant’s 1875 quasi-pornographic drama A la feuille de rose, maison turque was published in this edition of 225 copies in 1945; Nordmann’s copy was subsequently bound in this […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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-19th-century Moscow. Although his name does not appear on the title-page, this work […]

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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 […]

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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, […]

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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 […]

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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. […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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