Posted in Widener Library on Feb 4th, 2016 Comments Off on Images of the grotesque
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items recently cataloged from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. The Gypsy’s first issue was published in London in 1915 and contained short stories, essays, poems, illustrations, sonnets, and prose. In their foreword the editors of the magazine acknowledged that many people would criticize their endeavor in […]
Posted in Widener Library on Oct 8th, 2015 Comments Off on Police Bulletin
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. The publication Bulletin de Police Criminelle was a weekly publication distributed to specific police stations throughout France beginning in 1907. These bound copies come from the Chalon-sur-Saône police station which is located in the Burgundy region of […]
Posted in Houghton Library on Oct 1st, 2015 2 Comments »
Houghton Library has acquired the archive of French writer, literary theorist, and philosopher Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003) from his daughter, Cidalia Blanchot. Christie McDonald, Smith Professor of French Language and Literature at Harvard University, said, “I am thrilled by Houghton’s acquisition of this important archive. Scholars will have unprecedented access to material that will give us […]
Posted in Widener Library on Jan 22nd, 2015 Comments Off on Will the real Lewis de Claremont please stand up?
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. Lewis de Claremont is credited as the author on several occult books from the early 20th-century including Legends of Incense, Herbs, and Oils. The image of an “artist’s conception of Lewis de Claremont in tunic and turban […]
Posted in Widener Library on Oct 30th, 2014 Comments Off on Spooktacular!
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. In honor of Halloween I thought we share some creepy images that we found recently in a copy of Vu, a French periodical that covers a range of topics concerning France in the early 20th-century. As the cover […]
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 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 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 Apr 29th, 2014 2 Comments »
Alma Hirsig’s My life in a love cult.
Posted in Houghton Library on Apr 15th, 2014 Comments Off on Unmodified sexuality
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. We return to the occult in this week’s feature from the Santo Domingo Collection. Today’s author is Austin Osman Spare, an English artist, writer, and occultist active in the first half of the twentieth century. While Spare’s finely-wrought […]
Posted in Houghton Library on Mar 4th, 2014 Comments Off on L’Incal
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Julio Santo Domingo collected books across many forms; among them is the graphic novel. Pictured here is one of the great collaborations in French comics: L’Incal, written by Alejandro Jodorowsky, the Chilean-born French filmmaker, actor, and author, and […]
Posted in Houghton Library on Mar 3rd, 2014 Comments Off on The Curious Equations of William Empson
The heavily annotated books seen here belonged not to a famous mathematician or physicist but to the English literary critic and poet William Empson (1906-1984), best known for his first book, Seven Types of Ambiguity: A Study of its Effects on English Verse (1930), which established Empson, seemingly overnight, as one of the most important […]
Posted in Houghton Library on Jan 10th, 2014 Comments Off on Snow vogue
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. The depredations of the drug trade are fertile ground for crime and mystery fiction: pulp, in a word. In the Santo Domingo Collection, these lurid works stand on the shelves alongside opium-inspired poetry and countercultural acid narratives. Pictured […]
Posted in Houghton Library, Uncategorized on Nov 8th, 2013 Comments Off on A sumptuous edition of Pierre Louÿs’s unpublished poems
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 […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 3rd, 2013 Comments Off on The works of David Gascoyne
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 […]
Posted in Harvard Botany Libraries on Jul 9th, 2013 Comments Off on Cactus cultivation
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Interested in learning more about cacti and where they grow? This French publication of Les cactées cultivées could be for you. The volume was published by the Librairie Agricole de la Maison Rustique in 1931 by André Guillaumin, […]
Posted in Widener Library on May 10th, 2013 3 Comments »
This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection. Most people picture a chastity belt as a device that looks like iron underwear (complete with a lock) that was meant to keep a woman from having sexual relations. Legend has it that this device was invented during […]
Posted in Houghton Library on Jan 31st, 2011 1 Comment »
“Charles Olson, 1910-1970: a Centennial Selection from the Ralph Maud Collection,” on exhibit in Houghton Library’s Chaucer case (on the ground floor) since November 3, will be extended through February 7. The exhibition celebrates both the centennial of the birth of this influential American poet, and the 2009 gift to the Houghton of the Ralph […]
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