The Business is Suffering

Special Collections is more than just old books and dusty manuscripts. We also actively collect books created by contemporary artists who use the format of the book as their medium to explore deeper concepts while challenging societal expectations of how information is disseminated and received. One such book is The Business is Suffering (2003).

Made by Maureen Cummins, with typographic assistance from Kathy McMillan, this sobering project was inspired by a collection of letters found by the artist in the archive of the American Antiquarian Society. The letters are part of their Slavery in the U. S. collection and are concerned with the profitable business of trafficking humans between 1846 and 1863.

Cummins's artistic reproduction of the texts, one per folio, is juxtaposed with an image of human silhouettes whose numbers are inexorably diminished with each turn of a page. The silence of the enslaved is deafening when contrasted with the brisk and commonplace tone of the mirroring correspondence. 

To sit down with this moving and disturbing work, come to Special Collections and ask to see Presses C915cubu.

Steel!

If you follow this blog, you may have noticed that we are a bit nutty over early Soviet book design. Their modernist aesthetic combined with a celebration of the proletariat and the wonders of the machine age are so over the top they can't help but grab your attention. You add in a dose of hindsight (uh, that "utopia" was kind of a sham, and, well, there is Stalin...) and the unreality steeped in hyper realism strikes a cord of awe.

One of our latest additions is a brag book about the Soviet steel industry. Kachestvennai︠a︡ stalʹ SSSR (Moscow, 1935) makes its point immediately. It is bound in two sheets of high-quality steel engraved with the title. You open it up, and there, silhouetted with another sheet of steel between two cut sheets of paper, is Stalin admiring an info-graphic showing the impressive growth of steel production between 1927-1934.

You have to see it to believe it. Come in and ask for Rare Z246 .T45 1935.

A Man of Influence

Romain Rolland (1866-1944) was a renowned novelist, pacifist, vegetarian, and mystic whom you've likely never heard of unless you are an aficionado of early 20th-century Nobel Prize winners. Nevertheless, despite Rolland's marked absence from today's zeitgeist, he brushed elbows and had close friendships with an impressive list of notables from all walks of life. For example, he was a pen pal with conductor Richard Strauss and psychologist Sigmund Freud, was named as the dedicatee of Herman Hesse's Siddhartha, wrote a book on Mahatma Gandhi and then met the Indian leader, and attempted to intervene with Josef Stalin on behalf of his activist friends who opposed the dictator.

Ultimately, perhaps Rolland's star has waned in our time because of that last association: despite Rolland being characterized as a moral compass for Western culture both during and between World War I and World War II, his staunch adulation of Stalin well through the Second World War earned him rebuke and criticism from his peers.

Here at Rauner, we have a small but interesting collection of photographs taken of Rolland and various individuals, including Maxim Gorky and Mahatma Gandhi. To look through them, come to Special Collections and ask for Iconography 1505.

New Exhibit: "Histories Unheard"

This summer we celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Dartmouth Library’s Historical Accountability Student Research Program (HASRP). For the last five years, the program has been sponsored by the Provost’s Office under the auspices of the campus-wide Inclusive Excellence initiative. Born in the summer of 2018, the program initially provided for three competitive and fully funded fellowships, with an additional fourth fellowship funded every year through the generosity of the Sphinx Foundation. To date, the program has supported twenty undergraduate fellows and numerous interns, all of whom have conducted independent archival research related to issues of equity, diversity, and inclusion in Dartmouth College’s past.

Our innovative and dynamic program offers an open-ended scope for project topics. The program’s goal is not to create a definitive report or scholarly publication but instead to provide student researchers with hands-on experience conducting archival research and to keep the dialogue about historical accountability alive and moving forward. It is an ongoing conversation about our institution’s historical accountability, and not a conclusion or referendum.

So, although the program has been a great success so far, there is still much work to be done. Thanks to guaranteed funding from Dartmouth’s Office for Institutional Diversity and Equity, the Library will continue to provide opportunities for students to practice archival research skills while blazing trails into IDE issues for future researchers and scholars. Please celebrate the success of the program with us by exploring this exhibit that highlights the projects and research of select interns and fellows from the first five years of its existence.

This exhibit was curated by Val Werner '21, Historical Accountability Student Research Program Coordinator, and Morgan Swan, the Special Collections Librarian for Teaching and Scholarly Engagement. The poster was designed by Samantha Milnes, Collection Management Assistant at Rauner Special Collections Library. The exhibit will be on display in Rauner Special Collections Library's Class of 1965 Galleries from June 19, 2023, until September 15, 2023. Learn more by visiting the exhibit website.

Not THAT Josiah Bartlet

Dartmouth counts many famous people connected to the school. For the Fourth of July this year, we feature Josiah Bartlett... no, not the fictional one "t" President Bartlet on West Wing who taught economics here, but his actual namesake, two "tt" Josiah Bartlett, first Governor of the State of New Hampshire, the state's delegate to the Continental Congress and signer of the Declaration of Independence. A successful doctor, he was also a trustee of Dartmouth and was awarded an honorary degree at the 1790 graduation where he spoke.

We have a wonderful stash of letters in his papers (MS-181) that includes this gem perfect for the day. Writing to Bartlett from Exeter in August, 1776, Nathaniel Folsom enthuses:

The Declaration is well receivd here, has been duely published etc. As to myself and some of my particular friends with whom I have the happiness to agree in almost every publick measure it was extremely agreeable--it will (I doubt not) have a happy tendency to unite us in the present glorious struggle for by it many of the objections of wavering (tho' perhaps otherwise well disposed) persons are entirely answered--In short, it is the first principle of every virtuous man to keep a conscience void of offense toward God & man, it is the second thing he has in view to make it appear to the World. By the Declaration you make evident to the World that you are neither ashamed to own the Cause of Liberty nor afraid to defend it, and I doubt not it will be defended even against the Ultimo Ratio Regis.

The last line a reference to the news of most of the remainder of the letter which was almost exclusively concerned with the state of the troops, the building of a new fort and equipping a powder mill. We will be closed for the Fourth, but come in this week and look over Bartlett's communications as the country formed.

Elevating the Art of Wood Engraving

What is wood engraving exactly? It's a method of illustration printed from blocks of wood where the image has been carved into the end grain. Unlike other wood cuts, which are made by carving along the grain, the benefit of engraving is its hardness and durability. An engraved wood block could be used to print images in far more detail and would deteriorate far more slowly, even when applied in a printing press alongside metal type.

It wasn't until the 18th century that this technique was really embraced for illustration. It had previously been utilized to a degree but, to quote one account, "it can scarcely be said to have existed, except in its ruder forms. Tasteless emblematical ornaments and tail-pieces, diagrams and rough designs for magazines, illustrations of an elementary character for a few books." An English artist named Thomas Bewick (1753-1828) was responsible for the turnabout. Deeply in love with nature and with making art, a fourteen-year-old Bewick was apprenticed to the engraver Ralph Beilby, whose business was making such miscellanies as described above. He excelled at the work and, among the rest, began to take on commissions for children's books. With his own practice, he continued to develop his technique and eventually began writing his own books and illustrating them with wood engravings with a "singular technical dexterity."

Today's item is an 1807 edition of A General History of Quadrupeds, Bewick's first original text. A natural history book aimed at children, the General History is both informative and humorous. One description states that the porcupine, though "denied the privilege of making offensive war, it is sufficiently armed to resist the attacks of animals much more powerful than itself." Meanwhile, the zebra is "one of the most beautiful, and also one of the wildest and most untameable animals in nature... its liberty has heretofore remained uncontrouled." The book was massively successful with its intended audience, as well as with adult readers.

To see a charming book that helped kicked off wood engraving as a serious art form, ask for A General History of Quadrupeds, Illus B468be.

Fan Mail

Slipped into our copy of Frederick Douglass' My Bondage and My Freedom (New York and Auburn, 1855) is a memento of the author's fame. It's a letter, dated May 1, 1856, addressed to Passmore Williamson. Williamson was an abolitionist lawyer from Philadelphia. In 1855, he was charged under the Fugitive Slave Act for assisting a woman and her two sons escape from their enslavement. He served a 100-day jail term for contempt of court and his case brought renewed energy to the abolitionist movement and created a flurry of news coverage.

Less than five months after he was freed from jail, Williamson wrote to Frederick Douglass requesting his autograph for a friend. Douglass replied with a short, but passionate letter:

Passmore Williamson Esq. Please tender my thanks to your friend, the gentleman who honors me by wishing an Autograph letter from me. I comply with your request with very great pleasure--and all the more since I have again glanced at the Authentic history of the prosecution and persecution to which you have been subjected by the aggression and murderous Spirit of American Slavery.

On the back of the letter is a brief postscript: "This note was forgotten after writing it and therefore the delay in sending it--F. D."

First, we love the idea of Douglass forgetting the mail on his desk--busy as he was. It makes him even more human and real.

But what gets us is that he was being pursued by autograph hounds who used the leverage of their famous friends to get a note to the great man. Our copy of the book was presumably owned by the unnamed person Passmore Williamson passed this letter onto. The letter has been safely tucked inside for nearly 170 years.

Celebrate Juneteenth by coming in and taking a look. Ask for Rare E499 .D738 1855.