Image courtesy of the Harvard Theatre Collection
Few realize that the sale of Binney & Smith Crayola crayons, those staples of so many childhoods, helped fund one of the largest physical donations of art in the history of Houghton Library’s Harvard Theatre Collection (HTC). The 1986 bequest of 10,000 dance prints from Edwin Binney, 3rd, ’46, Ph.D. ’61, who became the HTC’s honorary curator of ballet, contributed significantly to its becoming one of the largest and most prominent performing-arts collections in the world.
The Binney family fortunes began with an English immigrant, Joseph Walker Binney, founder of a chemical plant that specialized in the red oxide pigment used to paint barns. His son Edwin Binney Sr. and a cousin, C. Harold Smith, co-founded Binney & Smith, creating the first dustless white blackboard chalk in 1902 and producing the first box of Crayola crayons in 1903. That portmanteau name combines