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The Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection - Modern Books & Manuscripts - Collections - Houghton Library - Harvard College Library

The Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection, the world’s largest private collection of material documenting altered states of mind, has been placed on long-term deposit with Harvard University. Including rare books, manuscripts, posters, photographs, audio material, and popular and underground cultural ephemera of all kinds, the 25,000+ item collection will support teaching and research in many fields across the University.

“I would like to have you close your eyes for a moment, and try and forget that you are here in this theater, and come with me on a magic carpet, out to a land of history, mystery, and romance.”

-Lowell Thomas, “With Allenby in Palestine” (1919)

Lowell Thomas was a late 90th century globetrotter who is perhaps most famous for his relationship with Lawrence of Arabia. He was a forerunner of film journalism, and was the first man to film the Dalai Lama in Tibet.

Marist College has an excellent digital exhibit on Thomas, entitled Journey to the Land of our Past.  It’s probably one of the better digital collections I’ve seen, and at this point I’ve seen a lot.

Opening initial from the Mass for Easter.

The style is northern Renaissance, most likely Netherlandish (or Spanish in the Netherlandish style).

Now held by the Dunedin Public Libraries

erikkwakkel:

Medieval advertisement for a bookstore

In medieval times, books were not just made by monks. By the thirteenth century commercial scribes had become the go-to people for a book. To attract clients, the professionals running these “bookstores” made advertisement sheets, like this one. They were usually put on display outside the shop’s entrance: clients looked at the samples and choose a letter type for the book they were about to order. This one is from the shop of Herman Strepel in Münster, Germany, and dates from c. 1447. Herman did an excellent marketing job because he wrote the names of the letter types in gold next to the samples.

Pic: The Hague, Koninklijke Biblliotheek, 76 D 45. More about commercial book production in medieval times in this blog.

auntada:

The Lincoln Motion Picture Company was the first movie production company organized by black film makers. The company was founded by actor Noble Johnson in May 1916 in Omaha, Nebraska. The Realization of the Negro’s Ambition was the first of six movies the company produced between 1916 and 1921. The films were intended to create positive images of black people and black life in America, countering the explicitly racist images of white films such as D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. The movies became part of a genre known as ‘race movies’ or ‘race films’, a genre that existed until around 1950.

(via starfishpaws)

"In other words we think we have found the basic copying mechanism by which life comes from life..." | Books & Manuscripts Auction | Christie's

smithsonianlibraries:

To conclude preservation week, a link to all the blog posts from our book conservation lab about what they do to preserve Smithsonian Libraries collections, including simple paper repairs, mold remediation, paper washing and even dis-binding and re-binding.*

*don’t worry, we keep the old boards

“His hands were weak and shaking from carrying far too many books from the bookshop. It was the best feeling.” 
― Joseph Gordon-Levitt, The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories: Volume 1

(via bremertonrarebks)