Word: houghtons
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...only hint at the enormity of the Houghton's collections. In all, the library contains hundreds of thousands of books and several million manuscripts. "They may or may not have been expensive to acquire," William Bond, curator of the Houghton Library, has written, "but they would be difficult or impossible to replace. their absence from a scholarly library would be unthinkable, and their artistic or historical values are susceptible to attrition through ordinary handling. They constitute the basic raw material and the evidence that must be handed on, intact if possible, from one generation of scholars to all those...
...years since the middle of the 17th century-when John Eliot called it "a large Library with some Bookes to it" - the library has acquired many volumes which have since become scarce. From among the volumes sitting on the stacks of Widener which there is no room for in Houghton, one could put together a rare books library that most universities in the country would be proud of Houghton itself has quadrupled its contents since the library opened...
Hofer, who founded the department of Printing and Graphic Arts, has been with the Houghton Library since its beginning. "Before the Houghton was built." he recalls. "the rare books and manuscripts were being kept in Widener Library in stacks that were on the ground, or even below ground, where the heat was enormous. There wasn't any way to turn it off adequately. Every morning when Bill [William A Jackson, curator or the Houghton from 1942 until his death in 1964] and I arrived at the so-called rare book room of Widener Library the temperature would be a minimum...
Hofer, at 70, remains a young, spry, active man. He laughed as he remembered the episode swung his legs over the arm of his chair, and went on, delighted. "That angered Arthur A. Houghton, class of 1928, who met with us afterward in the bar of the Ritz in Boston, where we took him to assuage our anguish and his thirst. He was a very good ally, and I said that I would go out on a Middle Western and Eastern tour of various friends of the Harvard Library to raise the money, if he would go with...
...said. Look. I've got another idea. Come on back in the library. We went back into Widener and sat down in the heat and he said. I had an old aunt who died and she left me some money. And you know, I really don't need it." Houghton gave Harvard a million dollars and the library opened in his name in February...