Houghton Library

Grrr!

Guillermo Deisler (1940-1995) was a Chilean artist who worked in stage design, woodcut printing, visual poetry, and the early global mail art movement.

Deisler was born in Santiago, but spent most of his life in East Germany. In 1973, he was arrested during the military coup in Chile and was forced into exile. He lived in France and Bulgaria, but eventually settled in East Germany.

He created artist books and unique mail art using rubber stamps and poetic imagery, blending word and picture. In 1987, he launched UNI/vers(;), also known as the Peacedream project—an international mail art publication with 35 issues, bringing together visual and experimental poets from around the world.

This publication entitled “Grrr” is an invitation to create meaning of this word on your own.

The note from the publisher in Spanish is translated as below:

“Grrr grrrr gr grrrrrrr gr grrrrrrrrr gr……

We invite readers to create their own translation of this message.”

This publication is a facsimile reissue of Guillermo Deisler’s artist’s book made in Antofagasta, Chile in 1969, under the aegis of Ediciones Mimbre (1963-1973). The facsimile publication was produced by Naranja Publicaciones after 50 years of its first publication. 500 copies were made that maintain the narration of the original and different printing techniques such as risography, letterpress, screen printing and stamping have been mixed.

You will find this and other artists’ publishing collections in our Reading Room.

This facsimile of The Royal Psalter of Sainte-Chapelle, an illuminated manuscript originally made in Paris in the early thirteenth century, is filled with a delightful variety of geometric, floral, and zoomorphic line fillers.

Medieval scribes and artists filled the empty space between lines with humor, providing a break from often serious texts and also creating visual balance and symmetry. We suspect that they must have had a lot of fun creating these quirky creatures.

The Fine Arts Library holds a collection of over 300 full-color facsimiles of illuminated manuscripts from a wide range of periods and traditions. The collection primarily includes religious texts, but representatives of secular works on poetry and literature, astronomy, travel, sketchbooks, and science and medicine are also included.

Galilei, Galileo, 1564-1642. Sidereus nuncius. 1610.

*IC6.G1333.610s

What in the World?

Everything is terrible, but for those attempting to compartmentalize, here is a beautiful 16th century map of Asia in the form of a pegasus.

The map appears in the Itinerarium Sacrae Scripturae of Heinrich Bünting (1545-1606) which describes the travels of biblical figures and Church Fathers. It includes several particularly unusual maps. The book was first published in 1581, and the image above is from a Swedish translation of 1591.

Link to catalog record below:

Les grands noelz nouueaulx, ca. 1550. A collection of 16th century French Christmas carols.

FC5.A100.550g

In this post, you will see an auction sale catalogue from 1781 with handwritten notes and detailed illustrations. There are 21 contemporary ink sketches of objects offered for sale. There are also handwritten notes on a page facing the title-page, which is an informative manuscript biography of Le Blanc written sometime in the 19th century.

Also featured is one of many facsimiles of illuminated manuscripts held by the Fine Arts Library. Facsimiles allow students to handle the objects and study a version of a manuscript very close to that found in the original repository.

Die Wiener Genesis : bildgewaltiges Erbe der frühen Christenheit is a full-size color reproduction of the entire Vienna Genesis, held by the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna. The facsimile replicates the manuscript’s look-and-feel and minute physical features, including laser-cut holes. The Vienna Genesis dates from the early Byzantine empire, and is among the oldest known illustrated biblical manuscripts. It is only one of two illuminated Greek Old Testament works to survive from before the period of imperially sanctioned iconoclasm in the eighth century. (Summarized from www.facsimilefinder.com.)

Facsimiles and auction sales catalogues can be requested to view in our Special Collections Study Room.

Last month, we had a wonderful tour of the current exhibit entitled Hồng-Ân Trương: With love from your Vietnamese sisters at the Radcliffe Institute. Thanks, Meg Rotzel, Curator of Exhibitions at Radcliffe College, for giving us a great tour!Our visit was joined by friends and colleagues from the Harvard Art Museums.

We enjoyed seeing and learning about Trương’s work, which engages deeply with archival materials to examine structures of time, memory, and the production and circulation of narrative histories. For this exhibition, Trương responded to an object held at Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library: a scrapbook created by the Vietnam Committee for Solidarity with the American People and gifted to Angela Davis in 1972.

We were also delighted to hear a story Meg shared about three intergenerational Vietnamese women who had never met before attending a public tour of the exhibit. They ended connecting after the tour and even returned to the exhibit again as a group and get together to cook.

Trương recently received an Anonymous Was A Woman Award. Congratulations to Trương!