Harriet Burleigh Janes

"I had Dr. Mason call to see me first--before dark--He left some medicine which relieved me in a short-time, but I do not think I was really well or happy during my sojourn there. It was so vastly different from the pleasant home I had left. While at Mo__ I endeavored to entertain myself by crocheting and sketching a little. As I had brought my maltese kitten--'Tony' with me, she helped to while a few lonesome hours away."

This quotation appears in diary we just acquired by Harriet Burleigh Janes. Janes was a Laconia, New Hampshire, native who wrote fiction under the name Effie Ray. Born May 27, 1845, Harriet Burleigh was writing and illustrating hand-sewn miniature books by the age of seven. At 18, her work was in print; A Letter From Effie Ray was published in the Trumpet and Freeman: A Universalist Magazine in 1863. Over the next several years, her short stories appeared in The Yankee Blade and The American Union. She was working on a novel, Leander, or The Haunted Manor, at the time of her death at age 30.

The diary will join her papers housed in Rauner Library. The collection includes her miniature books, drawings and other manuscripts. Perhaps the most curious part of the collection is the "spirit writings," many purportedly by Harriet Janes, that her grieving family received after her early death.

To learn more about this little known writer, ask for MS-844.

Calligraphic Emblems

We have a strong collection of emblem books that try to create a visual vocabulary of classical themes and emotions and we also have another collection that documents 19th-century calligraphy. So, you can imagine how pleased we were to find this little gem of a book, Arabesques mythologiques (Paris: Charles Barrois, 1810) which combines the two ideas in one.

Illustrated with 54 hand-colored emblems representing the characters of Greek and Roman myth, the book was a kind of primer for children to learn the classical gods and the myths surrounding them. The visual clues create more lasting memories than text alone and each emblem tries to capture the essence of the actors. But, unlike other emblem books, there is text intertwined into each image. Turn them sideways, and you find the names beautifully scripted into the images--each is an elegant design loaded with cultural meaning.

Ask for Rare BL725 G4 1810.

Trains, Trains and Railroads

Trainspotting can be something of an acquired taste, but for the true aficionado we present the Chase-Streeter collection. Formed mainly from gifts made by Judge William Martin Chase, Dartmouth 1858, and Thomas W. Streeter, Dartmouth 1904, the collection focuses primarily on the early history of New England railroads. It consists of over fifteen hundred items ranging from charters, annual reports of the various railroads to their stockholders, broadsides, and surveys of railroads, many with maps, to hearings before legislative bodies and pamphlets concerning legal disputes.

The collection also contains some more unique items such as a series of photographs documenting damage done to the Central Vermont Line during the 1938 hurricane. These images are eerily reminiscent of similar havoc caused by Hurricane Irene.

Other ephemeral items include a small set of timetables for various railroads, including several western lines, and a sampling of stock certificates for the New York Central Railroad and it's subsidiaries.

Search the Library catalog for all of the cataloged items in the collection. The items highlighted here are from Chase-Streeter New England C42 18 (hurricane damage), Chase-Streeter N45 1 (stock certificates) and Chase-Streeter U.S. General 10 (timetables).

Children at the Pole, with Penguins

Jack and Jill went up... to where? To the North Pole, naturally. We just acquired a very odd little book published not long after Cook purportedly reached the North Pole. The Children of the North Pole (London: George Harrap, 1914) is a sing-song verse describing the journey of parka clad Jack and Jill on their adventure to find the Pole. Along the way they ski, meet up with Eskimos, and encounter a friendly polar bear. But it is the trip home with the biggest surprise: dog sledding along they find themselves on Penguin Island.

The book's accordion fold structure allows it to open into kind of panorama. If you turn the book over and start reading from the other side, a prose version of the same story is told without pictures. In the prose version the penguins are explained. They came all they way north to congratulate the children and "to see whether the North Pole is like the South Pole." To Jack's question of whether there was a difference, the oldest penguin replied, "it is exactly like the South Pole, only it is day-time here when it is night with us."

Come take the journey by asking for Stef G614.C35 1914.

Peter Pan

Peter Pan is remembered as the boy who would "never grow up." Made famous by the 1904 play, Peter Pan, and the 1911 novel, Peter and Wendy, Peter is a classic character in children’s literature. Often, however, people forget that there is more to Peter Pan's author J. M. Barrie than Neverland. A quick search through Rauner can show Barrie's path to Pan and much more about the author’s professional and personal life.

J. M. Barrie began his literary career in 1888, with the Auld Licht Idylls. While Auld Licht and other sentimental novels allowed Barrie to achieve moderate success, his fame stemmed from his character Peter Pan. Peter first appeared in 1902, as a minor character in Barrie's novel for adults, The Little White Bird. It was in the 1904 play, however, that Peter made it big. Revisiting Peter Pan and Peter and Wendy, you might be surprised – the books are a bit darker than the Disney cartoon images I have in my mind. If you want to expand your Barrie repertoire, Rauner has many of Barrie's other less well known works, including "Der Tag:" or The Tragic Man and What Every Woman Knows.

Rauner also offers glimpses behind-the-scenes into Barrie's life. A letter in response to an invitation for a dinner honoring Stephen Crane at The Sing o' the Lanthorn gives us a taste of Barrie's connections. While Barrie was unable to make the dinner, he wrote of his enjoyment of The Red Badge of Courage. His correspondence with Gabriel Wells shows Barrie as an established author, with a well-regarded publisher and book-dealer pursuing his work. Or, you can flip through a scrapbook of material from 1888 to 1928 showing the transformation of Peter Pan from a fragment of Barrie's imagination to a film sensation.

To see the original The Little White Bird ask for Rare Book PZ 3.B277 Li2; the Peter Pan illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman is Illus H997ba; the Gabriel Wells Correspondence is in MS-585; and the Peter Pan Scrapbook is MS 118.

Posted for Kate Taylor '13

Gaming in Rauner

From time to time we come across an author that so distorts the typical conception of a "book" that we wonder--is this really a book at all? Angela Lorenz is one such author. Life, Life, Eternal Life: Uncle Wiggily Meets the Pilgrim’s Progress, Lorenz's "book" not a traditional book at all, but a handmade board game. As the title suggests, this board game is a meeting of the classic 334 year old Christian Parable, The Pilgrim's Progress, by John Bunyan and the board game Uncle Wiggily.

In this game, players take turns drawing cards and moving their pieces along the board following Christian's journey from the City of Destruction, Bunyan's earth, to the Celestial City, Bunyan's heaven. Similar to Uncle Wiggily, players receive help or hindrance from characters in Bunyan’s story--from Faithful, Christian's companion and friend, to Beelzebub, a devil who guards the road to heaven and shoots arrows at anyone who tries to pass. Players must also compete in a number of tasks--from a game of musical chairs, or "Going to Jerusalem," to a game of croquet, where players must hit their playing pieces through the Wicket Gate to begin their journey, to target practice using a handmade catapult, to spinning a teetorum, a sort of Christian dreidel, to cross over the River of Death.

"Why play this game at all?" Lorenz asks. "Well, in doing so you can get the gist of the biggest best seller next to the Bible and martyrologies for the last 300 years, one of the few books found for two centuries in many American parlors." And it's one of the most fun books in Rauner! So bring your friends, stop by, and ask for Presses L876loli.


Posted for Ben Ferguson '15

Dartmouth Publications

Dartmouth publications are not subtle in the pride they show in their history. Case in point: The Dartmouth's motto is "America’s Oldest College Newspaper." However, not every Dartmouth publication has been as long standing as The Dartmouth, which it claims was first printed as The Dartmouth Gazette in 1799. For every Dartmouth, Aegis or Jack-O-Lantern, there are dozens of publications that fell by the wayside. Fortunately, Rauner has copies of these gems that are no longer in print.

The Scrap-Book premiered in 1837 as a literary journal. Though one of the first, it would not be the last of a long list of literary and lifestyle publications Dartmouth students have published. The 1915 Third Rail, was "A Magazine of Adventures," and covered a wide range of topics considered to be of interest to the adventurers of Dartmouth College. Pace, a Dartmouth Lifestyle Magazine, from 1947, was packed with articles that could be lifted almost exactly from a modern publication. Along with the struggle of balancing weekend fun and school life and a discussion of the positives and negatives of fraternities at Dartmouth, the article "Advice to Freshmen" could be pasted into a guide for the class of 2017 with few noticeable changes.

Publications that feel the most dated upon rereading tend to be those covering social and political issues. The Tomahawk began in 1928 to fight "bigotry, muddle-headedness, and obscurantism" long before many of the battles later publications would fight were even thought of as problems. The irony of appropriating the term "tomahawk" to fight bigotry at a time when Native Americans were primarily represented at Dartmouth through caricatures of the "Indian" mascot seems to have been lost on the editors. In Your Face! ran from 1990-1992 and was dedicated to making Dartmouth's lesbian and gay community more visible. Spare Rib covered women's issues at Dartmouth in the early 1990's, running at the same time as the more radical Inner Bitch. Uncommon Threads, running from 1996-2000, served as an "anti-racist, anti-homophobic, anti-sexist and anti-classist" publication grappling with identity at Dartmouth.

Finally, there are a few publications that just don't make sense to the modern reader. Old Grimes seems to be a mix of satire and inside jokes from 1848. The modern reader will be left searching for the meaning of lines such as, "why is Hoyle BROOKE unnatural? Because he won't run down HILL!" Was it acknowledged as a point of humor that The Dart and The Mouth existed as two separate publications in 1947? Why was Bug chosen as the name of a 1992 journal of progressive analysis and not a magazine studying insects? Come by Rauner and attempt to puzzle out the answers to all these questions by looking through Dartmouth's periodicals, both the well-known and the widely forgotten.

Posted for Kate Taylor '13.