Meanwhile, in the Stacks...
Let's Get Physical
Houghton is described as a rare books and manuscripts library, but that description is definitely a misnomer. The library’s collection is not only restricted to books and manuscripts, nor does it stop in the realm of the printing, graphic, and book arts either. A significant part of the Houghton archive is composed of physical objects that sometimes have nothing to do with books and manuscripts, and that barely explored corner of the collection yields some of its most fascinating articles. The home of these realia is the Z-Closet Collection, which students can explore online on HOLLIS. The items there, some of which are listed below, are some of the most unique and unconventional materials in the library. Their presence in the library’s archive, however, only makes it a richer place, and the objects and the stories they tell can yield interesting approaches to the personalities and events to which they are connected.
First and foremost, the Z-Closet contains a surprising number of famous people’s death masks. Although this sounds morbid, death masks are a fascinatingly personal way to come into contact with figures who were larger than life. Death masks also bring us closer to a quintessentially human aspect of these timeless personalities: their mortality. Among the death masks at Houghton, one can find those belonging to American poet e. e. cummings, Irish novelist James Joyce, Harvard professor and renowned philosopher and psychologist William James, American novelist Henry James (supposedly cast by William James, who was his nephew, after a request by American impressionist painter John Singer Sargeant), English dictator Oliver Cromwell, Emperor Napoleon I of France, American editor and scholar Charles Eliot Norton, Italian poet Dante Alighieri, and American poet Walt Whitman, among others.
A Proclamation
It is 6:07 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 11. This article is due at midnight, and I’ve just begun to write it. Why? I think the reason is obvious, but let’s just say that the events of Tuesday turned my week into a whirlwind of grief. The anger I felt on the wee hours of morning of Wednesday turned into denial by mid-afternoon and early evening. I have not gotten over that stage yet. I don’t even want to know what depression will look like.
A few weeks ago, I began curating a Houghton exhibition that is to be put up around the time of Inauguration, celebrating the most powerful office in the land. Despite the unforeseen result, the exhibition will go on. One of the remarkable features of this nation is its people’s incredible faith in its institutions, of which the Presidency has been the most revered. We will see if this picture will change in the next few months.
Horror at Houghton
The end of October brings bad weather, shorter and shorter days, and, of course, Halloween. For college students, Halloweekend usually means one thing only—get wasted—but some among us still appreciate the eeriness that comes with All Hallow’s Eve. If you are one of those souls, you can add Houghton to the list of places that will make your skin crawl. The library, as a collector of old books and manuscripts, has plenty of creepy stuff that is not the human skin-bound book bound lying around in the stacks, and any horror enthusiast will have a field day exploring the collection items below.
To start off on a more orthodox note, Houghton possesses a fair share of first editions of the Gothic novels that terrorized 19th century minds and made our high school nights a bit more sleepless (mostly because it took hours to read them). Among its holdings are the 1818 first edition of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” (access to which is, unfortunately, restricted due to its fragility—the microforms can be found at Lamont under HOLLIS no. 006587145), the 1897 first edition of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” in its yellow cloth binding stamped in red (009433204), and plenty of original Edgar Allan Poe serials and books.
For All
Many people assume that Houghton, as a rare books and manuscripts library focused on the Western tradition, is simply not capable of the diversity that other Harvard book depositories exhibit. The University has, after all, so many spaces dedicated to the study of groups traditionally ignored by academia: Schlesinger Library, for instance, centers around women and women’s history, and Yenching Library revolves around the study of East Asia.
When I decided to begin a project to link pieces in the Houghton collection to each of the Harvard College concentrations, therefore, I was both exhilarated and apprehensive. I knew that subjects such as history, English, and comparative literature would be a piece of cake: Houghton has a preposterous numbers of First Folios, letters to and from chiefs of state, and manuscripts in countless languages. Leaving those traditional fields, however, the struggle seemed all too real: Without even thinking about the sciences, where to begin addressing the fields in the humanities and social sciences that did not put Western civilization on a pedestal?
Beneath the Skin
The mention of Houghton Library usually evokes, first and foremost, an inquisitive stare. “Houghton? What’s that? Oh, the building between Widener and Lamont? Like where Pusey is?” Those who have heard of the place before are usually no better at guessing what goes on inside. “I heard it’s a restricted library,” someone told me, not too long ago, when I told him I work there. “You have to get permission to go in.”
Some people, however, venture to ask me about the human-skin-bound book. “Wait, isn’t that where they keep it?” they say, their expressions a mix of disgust and wonder, something that only the bizarre can catalyze. “Have you ever seen it?”