Celebrating Harvard's Houghton Library's twenty-fifth anniversary, this large and sumptuous volume highlights the diversity and value of the Houghton's collections. It contains reproductions ranging from ancient and medieval manuscripts to the earliest printed books to the works of some of the twentieth-century's most important and interesting authors, artists, and designers. This work is intended not merely to celebrate the achievement of the past, but also to suggest the exciting vistas of the future.

The Houghton Library, 1942–1967: A Selection of Color Reproductions (Houghton Library Publications)

Harvard University Houghton Library

History

Houghton Library of the Harvard College Library

Picturing Emerson reproduces and explores the background of all known images of Ralph Waldo Emerson created from life, including drawings, paintings, silhouettes, sculptures, and photographs. The book provides dates for these images; information about their makers and Emerson’s sittings; as well as commentary by family members and contemporaries. The resulting work makes it possible for the first time to trace Emerson’s visage over seven decades.
Dating and correctly identifying images of Emerson has long challenged scholars, collectors, and the general public. By examining over fifty years of archival and published research―including web resources, library catalogs, and correspondence with international collections―the authors have been able to locate nearly 140 images dating from 1829 to immediately before Emerson’s death in 1882.
Joel Myerson has written or edited over sixty books on Emerson and the Transcendentalists, most recently Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Major Prose with Ronald A. Bosco. They have jointly received the Julian P. Boyd Award, the highest award presented by the Association for Documentary Editing. Leslie Perrin Wilson is a curator at the Concord Free Public Library, a repository known for significant holdings of Emerson portraiture. She has written extensively on local historical and literary topics.

Picturing Emerson: An Iconography (Harvard Library Bulletin)

Biographies & Memoirs

MYERSON, JOEL

Wilson, Leslie Perrin

Arts & Literature

Houghton Library―the primary repository for Harvard University’s rare books, manuscripts, and much more―celebrates its 75th anniversary in 2017. Houghton’s holdings span nearly the entire history of the written word, from papyrus to the laptop. This anniversary volume presents a snapshot of the unique items that fill the library’s shelves.
From miniature books composed by a teenage Charlotte Brontë to a massive medieval manuscript hymnbook; from the plays of Shakespeare to costume designs for Star Trek; and from the discoveries of Copernicus to the laptops of twenty-first century writers, the selections celebrate great achievements in many and diverse fields of human endeavor. For the first time, readers will be able to tour the Houghton Library collection―which draws thousands of visitors from around the world each year―from home, with full-color illustrations.

Houghton Library at 75: A Celebration of Its Collections (Houghton Library Publications)

Americas

Although the advent of the printing press heralded the end of the manuscript, the illuminated text still flourished through the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Many such manuscripts are works of extraordinary expressive power and have much to tell about the history of the graphic arts as well. Roger Wieck's catalogue carefully describes the extraordinary collection of graduals, breviaries, books of hours, and works of classical and vernacular literature assembled over the decades at Houghton Library.

Late Medieval and Renaissance Illuminated Manuscripts: 1350-1522, In the Houghton Library

Arts & Photography

Wieck, Roger S.

History & Criticism

An edition of fragments of Henry Fielding's unpublished treatise on eighteenth-century law, which were displayed at an exhibition at Houghton Library in 1987, including fragments from Harvard, Yale, and the Hyde Collection, now also at Harvard.

An Institute of the Pleas of the Crown: An Exhibition of the Hyde Collection at the Houghton Library, 1987 (Houghton Library Publications)

FIELDING, Henry

Reference

Calligrapher, stonecutter, illustrator, and type designer, Stephen Harvard's art and craftsmanship were rooted equally in the history of the book and the natural world. At his untimely death in 1988, Harvard left both a collection of graphic works and a body of prose that explored his dream of an ideal alphabet, "a perfect, proportionate set of images that shine with a pythagorean light," a dream that Harvard found as compelling and impossible "as the search for perpetual motion." David P. Becker's lovingly edited and sumptuously illustrated catalog, which won the American Library Association's 1991 Leab Exhibition Catalog Award for Excellence, bears out Harvard's conviction that typography, which is at once art and craft, must "strive to satisfy the intelligence and not the intelligentsia."

The Work of Stephen Harvard: A Life in Letters (Houghton Library Publications)

Becker, David P.

Graphic Design

Harvard's home for rare books and manuscripts opened in 1942, and thanks to the energy of a small group of librarians and the creativity and generosity of its benefactor, Arthur Houghton, it quickly emerged as a center of inquiry and memory without equal. This 1992 volume, compiled by senior Houghton librarians, blends documentary with oral history to look back on the library's origins, the growth of its collections, and the activities of the staff who made it a home for precious books and original scholarship.

A Houghton Library Chronicle, 1942–1992 (Houghton Library Publications)

Finlay, Nancy

Falsey, Elizabeth A.

Amory, Hugh

In celebration of the 50th anniversary of Harvard's Houghton Library in 1992, Curator of Manuscripts Rodney Dennis asked a stellar cast of critics, historians, and curators to write on items selected from the library's rich trove of manuscripts, which ranges from the papyrus fragments and ostraca of Antiquity to the papers of such modern figures as Elizabeth Bishop and Leon Trotsky. The result was Marks in the Fields, an extraordinary collection of essays by the likes of Helen Vendler, Christopher Ricks, and Lawrence Buell, which, in Dennis's words, combine to highlight "the natural patterns" found in manuscripts of all times and places, patterns that "go on occurring, everywhere and forever astonishing the mind."

The Marks in the Fields: Essays on the Uses of Manuscripts (Houghton Library Publications)

Literature & Fiction

Essays & Correspondence

Book by Stetz, Margaret D., Lasner, Mark Samuels

The Yellow Book: A Centenary Exhibition (Houghton Library Publications)

Stetz, Margaret D.

Lasner, Mark Samuels

A catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition "John Keats and the Exaltation of a Genius" at Houghton Library in 1995 and of the John Keats Bicentennial Conference. The catalog includes a preface by Richard Wendorf, and essays by Helen Vendler and William H. Bond.

John Keats, 1795–1995: With a Catalogue of the Harvard Keats Collection (Houghton Library Publications)

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Houghton Library of the Harvard College Library publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Houghton Library of the Harvard College Library