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...

In 1992 the Houghton Library celebrated fifty years of preeminence with an exhibition devoted to its riches. This work catalogs an astonishing range of books, manuscripts, and curiosities: a miniature stage set made for a 1975 Mabou Mines production of Samuel Beckett's play "The Lost Ones"; manuscript scores and first editions of works by Faure, Schumann, and Beethoven, among others; pathbreaking prints from the hands of Piranesi and Delacroix; drawings and manuscript items from such figures as Edward Lear, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Ben Shahn; remarkable examples of medieval manuscripts and...

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.

After the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, the art of writing in manuscript took on fresh meaning. Printed manuals for the teaching of lettering and handwriting quickly appeared, marketed to a growing literate readership anxious to express humanistic values through fine writing. Mixing the aesthetics of calligraphy with innovative means of printing, writing manuals reflect both the proliferation of print technology and the growing social value of a fine hand. Philip Hofer, Founding Curator of Printing and Graphic Arts in Houghton Library, was long fascinated with the...

The career of historian, bibliographer, and librarian George Parker Winship (1871-1952) combined curatorship and scholarship to a degree that seems remarkable today. As librarian and curator at Brown and later at Harvard, he championed the primacy of the role of rare books in American higher education. As a connoisseur and printer, he played an active role in promulgating enthusiasm for fine printing among collectors and readers in the early twentieth century. Through his teaching at Harvard College, he inspired a generation of bibliophiles. This slim, elegant volume collects three talks...

Download a PDF of page 70 which contains a correction "Decorated Book Papers," first published in 1942, remains one of the standard works on its subject. In it, Rosamond Loring, collector and maker of decorated papers, explores the history and use of decorated papers in the book arts: the early history of endpapers and marbling, marbled endpapers, printed endpapers, Dutch gilt or Dutch flowered papers, paste end-papers, nineteenth-century endpapers, publishers' endpapers, and pictorial endpapers. Appendices are devoted to the art of marbling, the preparation of paste papers, and a listing of...

In 1987 the Houghton Library observed the 150th anniversary of the death of Aleksandr Pushkin with an exhibition of materials drawn from the extraordinary Russian literature collection assembled by Bayard Kilgour. From this vast trove, curator John E. Malmstad chose some eighty items--books, letters, and manuscripts that illuminated Pushkin's life, career, and the world of influences and rivals that shaped Russia's most important literary voice.

This work explores the emergence of modern Greek language, thought, and sensibility reflected in Harvard's 80,000-item- strong collection of Greek books and manuscripts, ranging from fifteenth century liturgical manuals to Renaissance translations into modern Greek of Homer and other classical authors to the works and papers of such twentieth-century Greek literary figures as Nikos Kazantzakis, George Seferis, and C. P. Cavafy. With copious illustrations of Greek writing, design, and typography, Evro Layton's catalogue is a visual and intellectual treat for philhellenes.

In the late 1980s, Laura Light undertook the monumental task of bringing the catalogue descriptions of the Houghton's medieval manuscripts--more than 1,300 in all--up to the standards of modern scholarship. Among the fruits of that project was an exhibition in the Library of twelfth century Biblical manuscripts. Light's catalogue catches the culture of the medieval book at its height, not only in Bibles but in breviaries, lectionaries, commentaries, and works of the Doctors and Fathers of the Church.

Philip Hofer, who founded the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts in the Houghton Library, was a curator and collector of great zeal and singular taste. In this exhibition catalogue his successor, Eleanor Garvey, explores the rich legacy Hofer bequeathed to Harvard: extraordinary manuscripts, writing manuals, illustrated books, and examples of fine and unusual printing. The objects of Hofer's fancy constitute a teaching collection and a scholarly resource of the highest kind. They also justify the reputation he earned over a long and unique career as the "Prince of the Eye."