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.

“A wise man is never surprised”: Decoding a 200 year old cipher

One of my responsibilities at Rauner is ingesting PDF scans of archival material into our digital repository for long-term preservation. If you request a scan of an entire folder from us, after it is delivered to you, it will almost certainly pass through my laptop. We scan and deliver thousands of pages of files a year, and I don’t read them all, but if something happens to spark my curiosity, I do like to take a look. This is how I came across this surprising find earlier this year. Hidden in Box 4 Folder 1 of the Dinsmoor family papers, I found a secret message.

This is what cryptographers call a grille cipher. In a grille cipher, the message is hidden in a grid of letters. Decoding the message requires using a stencil or grille with holes cut out, which, when aligned in the right spot on the grid, blocks the filler letters and leaves only the letters of the message visible.

It should go without saying that discovering a secret message hidden in a collection of 18th century papers is about as exciting a find as an archivist can make. It is basically the plot of National Treasure. I couldn’t help but wonder what piece of information was so sensitive that Silas Dinsmoor took the time to construct this cipher, writing out these letters in a neat grid and carefully cutting out all these windows. Buried treasure seemed unlikely, but maybe it was something else: a family secret, a confession, a message to allies in wartime? I was determined to decode it.

Unfortunately, the paper was fragile and creased, making it hard to flatten the grille and align the windows without tearing the page. Fortunately, we have access to a crack team of conservators here at Dartmouth Libraries, and they were able to repair the paper and make it usable again. Assistant Conservator Matt Zimmerman explains how he did it:

“I humidified it in a humidification chamber made from a photo developing tray for about 45 minutes; then I further humidified the more stubborn creases by brushing ethanol into them, then I put the whole piece under weight between spunbonded polyester and blotter; once dry and flattened, I mended any tears with a very thin (3gsm) remoistenable Japanese tissue.”

With the pages back from Preservation and carefully enclosed in protective mylar sleeves, I sat down to decode the message. Starting with corner A of the grille in the top left corner, I aligned the two leaves and started writing down the letters I saw. When I reached the end of the grid, I rotated the grille so that corner B was in the top left, then C, then D. Then I flipped the page and decoded the text on the back. It was exciting to see the message start to reveal itself:

It is a ma
xim com
monly rec
eived t
hat a wise
man is ne
ver surp
rised…

Readers, I am sorry to disappoint, but there was no secret confession or clues to buried treasure hidden in this cipher. It is just a Samuel Johnson quote. Why Dinsmoor decided to encode it we may never know. Perhaps he enjoyed the challenge. Perhaps he wanted to prank us from beyond the grave. 

To decode the rest of the cipher yourself, request MS-40 Box 4 Folder 1 and come to the reading room.

This post was written by Charlie Langenbucher, Processing Specialist at Rauner Library.

A Signet Classic

Okay, it is just #715 in the regular Signet series, not part of the Signet Classics, but the cover sure qualifies as a classic. We were going through some books that came to us as part of the Charles Jackson Papers and the 1949 paperback of his The Fall of Valor stopped us in our tracks. Is that cover saying what we think it says? Yep--in 1949, they had the guts to blatantly show homosexual attraction right there on the cover. This must be one of the earliest (certainly the earliest in our collections) overt depiction of a queer theme on a book cover. This just wasn't done in the 1940s. You could have a gay subplot, you could even write a novel with a lesbian main character, but don't show it on the cover!

Signet was still being careful to let readers know this behavior was NOT normal. The inside cover couched the novel as a kind of psychological examination of a somewhat sinister condition: Jackson explores "the dark corners of the unconscious... whose inevitable climax inspires both terror and pity." Then, if we didn't get it, they say, "The Fall of Valor is a medical case history transmuted into dramatic and expressive fiction." Well, they were still being pretty damned homophobic on the inside, but they were willing to go for it on the cover. It might be worrisome, but they knew sex sells.

We haven't cataloged this one quite yet, but it will be ready soon. 

Different, the Same, then Different Again

We have been doing some work to enhance access to our collection of 'incunabula,' the term used for books printed in the 15th century. We have around 165 of these books, and it is a fun period of book history because the printers were still figuring out this newfangled technology. They were doing some lovely work bringing the design and aesthetic of the manuscript world into a new era of print and every copy of every book has its own idiosyncrasies.

Oddly, we recently discovered that we have two copies of Saint Bonaventure's commentary on Peter Lombard's Sentences, both printed by Anton Koberger in 1491. This in itself isn't that odd; the book was very popular, and issued multiple times. However, because they were so differently cataloged, we didn't realize they were the same thing until we took a closer look at them. Also, although they are the same book, they are still two very different objects. One of our copies is made up from two issues so they are not the same in that way but, more interestingly, their decorative embellishments vary. Not willing to leave the past behind them completely, early modern printers would leave blank spaces for fancy initial letters to be drawn in by hand after the printing was done. Clearly our two copies went off to different artists to be finished off.

To see them ask for Incunabula 31 and Incunabula 152. 

Body-Snatching and Bad Luck

In the winter of 1810, Doctor Nathan Smith wrote from Hanover to a fellow physician in Philadelphia. Smith apologized for not writing sooner to his friend and colleague, blaming the delay on a "little bad luck" back in December that had given him "great inquietude." As the founder of Dartmouth's medical school in 1797 and its only professor of medicine at the time, Smith was also the instructor of anatomy. The bad luck, it turned out, was that Smith had contracted with an untrustworthy individual to procure a fresh cadaver for the school's anatomy lectures. Instead of going to Boston and purchasing a body there as instructed, the independent contractor instead snatched a newly deceased corpse from the Enfield graveyard only a few miles to the east of campus. It wasn't long before a local officer of the peace appeared in the middle of an anatomy lab dissection and reclaimed the cadaver. At the time of the letter, Smith expressed confidence that "we shall survive the accident without material injury either personal or to the Institution."

President John Wheelock was less optimistic a few months earlier when writing to Benjamin J. Gilbert, a local lawyer and influential member of the community. In his letter to Gilbert, dated December 18th, 1809, Wheelock suggests that it was Dartmouth medical students who had stolen the body. Speaking for the College administration, he affirmed that "We cannot express the detestation and abhorence [sic] which we feel on account of this inhuman & barbarous act, nor our ardent desire that the perpetrator or perpetrators may be found and brought to justice, as an example to deter others from the perpetration of such an infamous crime." As evidence of the college's commitment to re-establishing the "public confidence" in Dartmouth, he included with his letter a resolution that granted Gilbert and other prominent leaders of the Upper Valley community permission to inspect the rooms of the students whenever they wished. In the resolution, Wheelock acknowledges that the reputation of the medical school is inextricably linked to that of the college, and that "recent events" have damaged the entire institution's reputation among the community.

Despite the earnest and swift response by Wheelock, body-snatching continued to be a problem for at least the next century, not just at Dartmouth but nationwide. To read Nathan Smith's letter, request MSS 810163 online. To read Wheelock's letter to Gilbert and the entirety of the resolution, request MSS 809668 and MSS 809668.1.

At the Late Night, Double-Feature Picture Show... by RKO

Trying to pick a scary movie to watch tonight? How about pulling some inspiration from Rauner's script collection? We have a few great ones from RKO Pictures. For something really classic, take a look at our screenplay for the 1933 King Kong, which is still spawning sequels and spin-offs today.

If you want something a little more off the beaten path, how about one of the films produced by Val Lewton? Lewton was hired by RKO in 1942 to make successful horror movies on shoestring budgets, particularly useful to the faltering studio after the financial failures of Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons. He would be given a sensational title, a small budget, and the task of making something that could emulate the monstrous successes of Universal Studios. Instead, Lewton tended to make quiet, unsettling psychological pictures with a deeply nihilistic edge. They were successful enough at the time, and some are now considered classics. We have the scripts for two big ones: Cat People (1942) and I Walked With a Zombie (1943). The latter, a very loose adaptation of Jane Eyre with the addition of a Haitian Vodou element, has a subtitle reading "Based on Scientific Information from Articles by Inez Wallace." It also bears a handwritten note reading "Mr. Breen." We can't say for sure, but perhaps this copy passed through the hands of Joseph Breen, who enforced the Hays Production Code from the 1930s to 1950s. We'd be curious to hear what he thought of this particular picture, but we suspect it wasn't his thing. 

To take a look at the these spooky screenplays, check out Scripts 2206 (King Kong), Scripts 537 (Cat People), and Scripts 1064 (I Walked With a Zombie).