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.

“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.