Spring Colors

This time of year, we're getting pretty wistful for spring. As such, we've been looking at books on flowers and we have a lovely one to share today. Margaret Roscoe's 1829 Floral Illustrations of the Seasons is just what it sounds like: a series of botanical illustrations, each accompanied by a brief description of its classification, cultivation, and history. Prior to this work, Roscoe (née Lace) illustrated another botanical text written by her father-in-law, William Roscoe. Floral Illustrations is dedicated to William, who she describes as a generous patron of the science.  

In the process of making this book, Margaret Roscoe's original illustrations needed to be reproduced in print. To accomplish this, a professional engraver named Robert Havell made aquatint plates imitating her work as closely as possible. Those plates would print black-and-white images, which were then colored by hand. The finished prints could then be bound into each copy of the book, creating a run of more or less identical works. 

The color is the real reason we're mentioning this process now. There's inherent distance between whatever those original illustrations looked like and the published prints, but they were both physical mediums. But there's a new, significant layer of separation in showcasing this book now: the limitations of digital color. You can see the photos included in this post through something called the RGB color model. It's how phones and computers represent all colors, based on various combinations of red, green, and blue light. It's an impressive technology with a very nuanced output, but what it shows you is not how color works on the page. 

When you look at a book (and most other things) in real life, the color tends to be subtractive: white light passes through an object and the nature of the object allows differing wavelengths to be absorbed or reflected. Those wavelengths are then translated by your eye, resulting in your own color perception. This is fundamentally how the pigment on a colored illustration works. In these photos, RGB is doing its best to represent the yellow of the crocus and the blue of the spring gentian, but it is doing so by emitting light, when the illustrations are producing that color by selectively absorbing it. As such, it doesn't actually look the same.

The colors in Floral Illustrations have remained remarkably vivid, despite being almost 200 years old. This foray into optics is all to say that if you want a reminder that spring is coming, we have you covered. We just really recommend that you come see it in person. 

To see this particular piece of loveliness, come to Rauner and request Rare Book SB407 .R79 1829.

Exhibit: "Making the Case for Suffrage"

From the vantage point of 2026, women’s right to vote can seem like a foregone conclusion. Yet it took women almost 150 years from the founding of the United States, and over 70 years from the first women’s rights convention, for women to achieve suffrage on a national level. And even then, it was a partial victory: the Nineteenth Amendment, ratified in 1920, did not protect the rights of minoritized women, many of whom remained prohibited in practice from exercising the franchise.

This exhibit examines some of the strategies women employed to argue for their right to suffrage. It looks at how suffragists relied on mass media and popular culture to create what they referred to as “propaganda” for their cause. It highlights how they utilized American symbols, how they deployed their organizational networks in campaigns of persuasion, and how they eventually turned to more public and direct forms of action to convince American men to grant them the vote.

This exhibit is not a comprehensive overview of the suffrage movement. Limited by the material in Rauner’s collections, it largely focuses on white women suffragists and on the final two decades of the suffrage campaign.

The exhibit was curated by Sarah Bowman, Processing Specialist at Rauner Special Collections Library. The poster was designed by Max Seidman, Exhibits and Graphic Arts Designer for Dartmouth Libraries. It will be on display in Rauner Special Collections Library's Class of 1965 Galleries from January 7th through March 13th, 2026. For more information, visit the exhibit website.

Middle English Printing's Infancy

Lately our Rare Book and Manuscript Metadata Librarian has been spending a portion of his time reviewing our incunable collection and, as a result, we have the opportunity to learn more about the volumes in our collection. An incunable, as you may already know, is the term commonly used to identify a book that was printed on a printing press using moveable type in 15th-century Europe. The name is derived from the Latin word for "cradle"and is meant in this context to refer to the infancy of printing in the West. We currently have nearly two hundred copies in our collection out of roughly thirty thousand individual editions that were printed during the period.

Most incunables were printed in Latin, which makes sense considering that this was the language of the intelligentsia of the time. Today, however, we're showing off a rarer breed of book. Only about a quarter of all incurables were printed in the vernacular instead of Latin, and of those perhaps around fifty editions were printed in Middle English. And we have one of them here at Rauner.

The first Middle English vernacular edition of Vitas Patrum, or Lives of the Fathers, was printed in London, England, in 1495 by Wynken De Worde. Vitas Patrum is a compilation of narratives and sayings associated with the early patriarchs of the Christian Church that was originally transcribed from Greek into Latin in the late 4th century. Over a thousand years later, William Caxton translated the book into Middle English. Caxton was the first person to introduce the printing press to England (1476), and De Worde was his protégé. One of the most interesting details of this edition, in our opinion, is the way in which the typeface has clearly been designed to imitate English vernacular handwriting of the era.

To see one of the earliest books ever printed in English, come to Rauner and ask for Incunable 65.

Weekly Sings in Webster

We recently ran into something interesting in our files on the Student Army Training Corps. The SATC was a federal program implemented during World War I, intended to speed along young men's readiness to go to war by allowing them to participate in both college classes and military training. Dartmouth was a participating school, and tucked into some other information provided to the program's instructors is a report compiled from several universities on the practice of singing in the SATC.

Organized singing as recreation, communal activity, and morale boost was apparently common enough in SATC units that the War Department felt it necessary to gather data on how it manifested at different institutions, "as a matter of information and a means of comparing results... as suggestions for possible future developments." Dartmouth is a contributor and reports that weekly sings would be hosted in Webster Hall of "the entire S.A.T.C. (nearly 1000 men)... on the stage were a grand piano and a combined band and orchestra of about 50." This became a popular event beyond the participants themselves, drawing a public audience from nearby towns that grew every week. 

Before Webster Hall housed Rauner Library it was an auditorium -- and you can tell from the acoustics if you've ever visited.  A thousand men singing in this space must have made quite the noise!

To read more about SATC sings, ask for DO-12 Box 6289 Folder 1. 

 

The Twelve Terrors of Christmas

Feeling a bit brought down by the season? You’re not the only one. This week we’re highlighting a wry little number, currently on display as part of our “A Ghost Story for Christmas” exhibit. John Updike’s The Twelve Terrors of Christmas attempts to distill the parts of the holiday that inspire more dread than joy in its celebrants into twelve poems. Most of these are commercial trappings like "The Specials" and "Fear of Not Giving Enough". But some are more existential, with the final item on the list being "The Dark". That particular entry reads as follows:

“Oh, how early it comes now! How creepy and green in the gills everyone looks, scrabbling along in drab winter wraps by the phosphorous light of department-store windows full of Styrofoam snow, mockups of a factitious 1890, and beige mannequins posed with false jauntiness in plaid bathrobes. Is this Hell, or just an upturn in consumer confidence?”

Twelve Terrors was originally published in 1992, but its anxieties remain relevant today in one form or another. The text is accompanied by appropriately dreary Edward Gorey illustrations. Shell-shocked shoppers wander through the pages, waiting in lines, eyeing the Christmas tree with suspicion, and placing anxious children on an equally uneasy Santa's lap. It's a hoot, and we recommend it if a little holiday grumbling sounds good to you.

Come see this and other items in our "A Ghost Story for Christmas" exhibit, up through the end of January. If you miss that, just ask for Illus G675upt.

New Additions to our Collections!

In addition to our current collections of phenomenal books and manuscripts, we are always collecting new amazing items that we know will be used eagerly by students in our classrooms. The breadth and depth of our teaching across the curriculum is represented in the following list of recent acquisitions, all of which were added to our shelves over the last three or four months. If you'd like to visit us to see any of them in person, place a request via the linked catalog record and then come to Rauner!

Codex 003545: A 17th-century manuscript scroll containing the Lotus Sutra, one of the most important texts of the Mahayana branch of Buddhism.

Incunabula 171: A single sheet from a 1483-84 almanac printed by Johannes Angelus, a prominent physician/astrologer/astronomer who practiced his trade in Vienna in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. This particular page provides advice on how to pair medical treatment with beneficial astrological signs  for the coming year.

Presses L876lokn: Book artist Angela Lorenz created this volume, titled Known no-bodies, in 2025. The work displays seven original watercolor paintings of "portrait-like figures, each with aspects of a face and a body with various fanciful modifications".

Rare CT3202 .B4 1804: Matilda Bethany's Biographical Dictionary of the celebrated women of every age and country was printed in 1804 and contains short biographies of famous women from antiquity to the present day, organized alphabetically.

Rare RM184.5 .K45 1753: A book printed in 1753 and written in Chinese with Japanese reading marks that explains the locations and relations of fourteen meridians and acupuncture points using woodcut illustrations.

Rare PA6801 .A2 1502: The 1502 Strasbourg printing of the works of Virgil, sometimes known as the "Grüninger Virgil" after the name of its printer. The work contains 137 original full-block woodcuts that were influential for artists and printers across Germany, Italy, and France for several centuries.

Rare G2355 .N577 1666b: Japan's first atlas published in Kanbun 6 (1666), consisting of 1 preface and 16 provincial maps. The accompanying text describes routes on the maps and includes such information as statistics for rice production and distances between various points by land and sea.

A Ghost Story for Christmas

When A Christmas Carol was published in 1843, it came with the subtitle "Being a ghost story of Christmas." Ghosts might not be the first thing we think of at Christmas-time, but in the U.K. there is a well-established storytelling tradition on just that subject. It's difficult to say if Dickens is completely to blame for this, or if he merely provided the literary text that brought an existing folk practice into a more traceable medium. Oral tradition, after all, is tricky to pin down.

Regardless, the Victorians took this idea and ran with it, and the English-language ghost story had a heyday running from the mid-19th century well into the first half of the 20th. Christmas drifts in and out of the picture -- there are many chilling tales taking place during the holiday, but it was just as frequently used as a framing device for something unrelated. The Turn of the Screw, for instance, begins with a group telling ghost stories at a Christmas Eve party, leading one guest to dig up a manuscript he possesses entailing a "real" encounter, and thus bringing us to the actual plot.

The medievalist (and rare book man!) M.R. James deserves special mention here, having published collection after collection of chilling tales throughout the first thirty years of the 20th century. Many of these began as entertainment devised specifically to read aloud to his students and colleagues during the holiday season. The same stories served as ready inspiration in the 1970s, when the BBC began an annual television program fittingly called "A Ghost Story for Christmas." From 1971 to 1978, a short ghostly film, most often adapted from James, would be aired on or just before Christmas. The series was revived in 2005 and has continued on and off since then.

We've just installed a new single-case exhibit showing off an array of spooky tales, some taking place at Christmas and some just referencing the storytelling tradition itself. Dickens is there, as is The Turn of the Screw, as are M.R. James's published thoughts on what a ghost story requires in order to succeed. We suggest dropping by to see it sometime, especially if you need a change of pace from what can feel like mandatory holiday cheer.