Word: rare
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Back in the days before World War II, Harvard's burgeoning collection of rare books and manuscripts overflowed the confines of Widener's so-called Treasure Room, and began to encroach on the rest of the library's second floor. The University appropriated some of the then-vacant land to the east of Widener and, shortly before Pearl Harbor cut off the the supply of building materials, Houghton Library was opened. Today it houses one of the finest collections of its kind in the world...
...finest collection of "Keatsiana" anywhere. Including manuscript copies of three major poems Lamia, St. Agnes Eve, and Ode to Autumn, the collection contains two-thirds of the bulk of Keats' surviving manuscripts. About one-half of the collection was given to Harvard by Amy Lowell, along with many rare books from her own library; an addition, equal in size to the original gift was given later by Amory Houghton who occasionally adds new material...
...walks through the antiseptic stacks, along the rows of first editions and rare presentation copies, the varied titles are continually dazzling. In one section are first editions of Frost, Thoreau, Longfellow, Melville. The library considers New England authors its special province...
...Tibetan wonder book, combining holy writ with popular ideas on political and natural science. On the outside of each volume in addition to the insciption in the inscrutable and original Tibetan, are a number of small swatches of brilliantly colored, oriental cloth, which carry some mystic meaning to the rare cognoscentus...
...addition to the manuscripts, the library posesses a striking collection of that rare bibliophilic genre, incunabula. These volumes represent the earliest of printed books, dating from the invention of the printing press in the middle 15th Century until...