Plan of Paris

One of the pleasures of working in Rauner Library is the "discovery" of things we never really appreciated. While preparing for a class session on French cultural history, we found a catalog listing for Turgot's ambitious Plan of Paris from 1739. The book contains 20 plates that fit together to create a detailed, bird's eye view of Paris as it was in 1739.  The cartographers were given permission to enter any structure in Paris so they could accurately depict every feature of the city.

Curiously, the map is not laid out in the conventional north-south perspective.  Instead, we see the city from the east. The reason?  So the facades of the east-facing churches could be displayed.  Fully assembled, the map would be approximately eight feet tall and ten feet wide.

Come see the atlas by requesting Rare Book G1844.P3 B7 1739.  Kyoto University Library created an interactive digital version.

SS Dartmouth Victory

One of the 534 Victory ships built during World War Two, the SS Dartmouth Victory was hull number 169.  Construction was carried out by the Oregon Shipbuilding Corporation and the ship was launched on February 15, 1945.  After final completion on March 17, 1945, the SS Dartmouth Victory served as a cargo transport for the remainder of the war.  The ship was later taken over by American President Lines and renamed the General Arthur.

Victory ships were designed as fast cargo transports and were built in large numbers to offset losses caused by German submarines. Due to slow initial delivery, though, the Victory ships saw most action in the Pacific.

Shown here are the SS Dartmouth Victory's launching and the Dartmouth alumni who attended the event.  Ask for the "Dartmouth Victory (SS)" photo file to see additional images.

Hamlet in Images

Shakespeare is enacted in many different ways: traditionally as stage production, but also adapted for movies, novels, and other media. But, in Dorothy Stewart's 1949 book, Hamlet, we have a production of Shakespeare as image and text. Stewart "condensed" the play and paired its text with stark woodcut images to tell the story.  Revolutionary for its time, the book more closely resembles a graphic novel than the text of a play.

Can a book be a performance? It appears so. The woodcut characters act out their parts, hold up scrolls, spiral into nightmares or sink, drowned, just under the water. After reading Stewart's production, you feel you have seen Hamlet, or at least a version of it.

To see it, just ask for Rauner Presses P588s.

Prints à la poupée

Poetry by Hughes, Engravings by Baskin, Work by Gehenna, Wow. Oh, and learn about à la poupée prints all at the same time.

"A book of twenty new poems by Ted Hughes & twenty-five engravings by Leonard Baskin. The poems will not be reprinted in the poet's lifetime. Capriccio is conceived on a grand scale, it is a large folio, & pleases in harmonious deployment of illustration & type. These poems are revelatory of the human condition & represent England's Poet Laureate at his most powerfully convincing. The poems probe at reality with characteristic intensity."

So reads the prospectus from Gehenna Press anticipating the publication of Capriccio in the Spring of 1990.

A wonderful work to see and feel directly.

Ask for Rauner Presses G274huc

Revolution made sweet...

Cia. Industrial Empacadora de Dulces, S. A., as part of an advertising campaign for canned fruit, offered a premium with each purchase: individual, illustrated, and numbered cards depicting Cuban revolutionary history. They also provided a book with individual places to paste each of the 268 numbered cards. Below the spaces were brief captions of the events depicted. Three additional cards depicting flags for distinct revolutionary movements in Cuba were also provided to be pasted on the inside front cover. Quotes from Fidel Castro are printed on the inside back cover.

The advertising campaign was probably started around 1960. The publication is from Havana.

Is this truly propaganda for a post-revolutionary society based on communist principles? Is this a children's illustrated book? Would most individuals acquiring these cards be capable readers of history? Look at the back cover. What exactly were local consumers being sold?

An interesting book artifact, unsettling in the visual depictions paired with sweet desserts.....

Ask for Rauner Rare Book F1781.5

Digital Comics

Two important early comic books from our collections are now available digitally through the efforts of the Library's digital production team:  The Adventures of Mr. Obadiah Oldbuck (1842) the first graphical novel published in the United States, originally published in French in 1837 as Les Amours de M. Vieux Bois; and The Fortunes of Ferdinand Flipper (185?), the first graphical novel written in the United States.  Both digitized comics will be used by students this term in English 67: Graphic Novels.

To see the good old fashioned paper copies, ask for Rare Book NC1659.T58 A6213 1840z and Rare Book NC1420.F68.

The Power of Satire

Ten years before the 13th Amendment became law, an advertisement for a slave auction appeared in the July 1855 issue of the Dartmouth Oestrus. Knowing the political and satirical nature of this undergraduate publication, Dartmouth College students at that time surely were not fooled into believing the advertisement was real. President Nathan Lord's pro-slavery stance, defended in his Letter of Inquiry to Ministers of the Gospel of all Denominations on Slavery, was a frequent target for the anger of the largely abolitionist campus. Advertising an auction at which Lord's wife Betsey and their children would be sold as slaves, was an acceptable level of protest against his stance on the "peculiar institution."

In more recent years, the ad has enjoyed some success as a hoax. The College Archives does receive inquiries about mid-19th century slavery in Hanover, occasionally based on researchers discovering this item. Out of the context of the publication and its times, even our readers on April Fools Day might have found it possible to believe the cruelty of slavery also touched Hanover, before reading further.

Ask for the The Dartmouth Oestrus, DC History LH 1 D2D282 and Letter of Inquiry to Ministers of the Gospel of all Denominations on Slavery, 4th edition, DC History E 449 L654 1860.