Making a Compromise with the Public Taste

This week the "American Curmudgeons" exhibit has opened at Rauner Library. Running from January 7th until February 28th, the exhibit displays materials related to Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, and H. L. Mencken. We're especially excited about one of the items we discovered while preparing the exhibit, namely a letter from H. L. Mencken to Ezra Pound written in August of 1917. Sadly, we have only the first page of the letter.

Mencken, in addition to his role as relentless journalistic scourge of bumbling idiots and pretentious fools, was the co-editor of several influential literary magazines, notably The Smart Set and The American Mercury. He was as untiring in his support of writers and journalists in whom he saw merit as he was in castigating those who in his opinion were utterly without talent. In this letter, written during his tenure as co-editor of The Smart Set, Mencken puts his influence to work, recommending various writers to another influential editor, Ezra Pound of The Little Review.

In the body of the letter, Mencken plays upon the slogan of The Little Review, "Making No Compromise with the Public Taste," by stating that financial obligations require his own magazine to make aesthetic compromises constantly in order to sell copies. Mencken's literary acumen is evidenced here by his assertion that Pound has been "getting some excellent stuff" into his magazine; only seven months later, the first chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses would be published within its pages, marking the first appearance of one of the most important novels of the century.

To see the letter now, come over to Rauner and take a look at the exhibit. Starting in March, ask for MS-693 Box 1. To see copies of The Little Review, ask for Rare AP2 .L647.

Dartmouth Ski Tramway

It seems that once again ski season is upon us. Long regarded as a favorite New England skiing and snowboarding destination, New Hampshire boasts a hearty twenty-two skiing areas and resorts. Dartmouth, in extension, is consistently ranked as the preferred college for skiers and winter outdoorsman alike. Dartmouth claims 13% of the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame and has competed in every Winter Olympic Games since the first games in Chamonix in 1924.

Just how did Dartmouth get to be so popular amongst skiers? Well, our new exhibit, Innovation on the Slopes: The Early Years of Skiing at Dartmouth explores the beginnings of this cozy relationship, on display in Baker-Berry Library this week through March. One of our favorite items from the exhibit is Fredrick Bryon Tomlinson's design and computation sketches for the J-bar at the Oak Hill Ski Area. The Oak Hill Ski Area opened in 1935 right off Reservoir Road in Hanover. When it debuted, the "Dartmouth Ski Tramway," as it was termed, was credited as the nation's first overhead lift. The tow transported 600 skiers per hour up 350 feet. The design included an 80 horsepower engine and a 6-foot wheel weighing 1,600 lbs. As the story goes, in the early 1930s, Dan Hatch, who was the General Manager of the Dartmouth Outing Club  got the idea for the lift from a winter sports pamphlet on the J-Bar lift at Davos, Switzerland, patented by Zurich engineer Ernest Constam. He then commissioned F. Bryon Tomlinson '35 Th '36 to design the Oak Hill Ski Tow under the direction of Professor William P. Kimball, then Dean of the Thayer School of Engineering. Though the project was eventually passed on to the Split Ballbearing Corporation in Lebanon to pioneer the actual implementation of the job, the Oak Hill is considered the first U.S. lift with power from the rear instead of traction from the front. Of course, it wasn’t soon before improved ski-lifts appeared all over the Eastern ski region, but according to the DOC website, Oak Hill continued to be Dartmouth's primary alpine slope until the Dartmouth Skiway was established in the mid-’50s. The sketches are just a few of the many interesting items in the exhibit, including a trailer from the upcoming documentary on Dartmouth ski culture, Passion for Skiing.

If you want to check out Tomlinson's designs for yourself, ask for Manuscript 936940.3. For more information on Oak Hill, ask for either the Oak Hill vertical file or the Oak Hill photo file. And be sure to stop and check out the Innovation on the Slopes exhibit now on display through March in Baker-Berry Library.

Oh, the weather outside is frightful….

It was COLD this morning, and even colder yesterday, but an old time New Englander might pooh-pooh that with a "Hey, when I was a kid, there were weeks in January when we never saw the warm side of zero." Would he be remembering correctly? Am I really becoming a weather wimp?

Luckily, Rauner has an extremely good set of weather records and observations, dating back to Ebenezer Adams, Jr.'s first entry in November 1827. And, by the way, Adams recorded that in 1835, it was 32 degrees below zero on January 4th, so I guess we should stop complaining,

Some of the weather records are official recordings taken on various instruments at Shattuck Observatory. Others have been recorded and compiled by volunteer observers. Professor of Astronomy Richard Goddard was often a recorder at the observatory. His report from a particularly cloudy January 50 years ago, shows his delight at a "Clear day!" Goddard also used the records to compile mean temperatures and precipitation totals over the course of decades; the files contain many of his charts, graphs and tables.

None of these were very useful to a researcher who once came in to use our meteorological records to determine the change in climate on campus after coeducation was implemented, but if you ever get to wondering just how windy it was in Hanover during the hurricane of 1938, or how much snow fell here during the Great Blizzard of 1888, or if that old timer was right about weeks of subzero temps, Rauner might just have the documents you need.

Ask for The Shattuck Observatory Records, DA-9. A finding aid is available.

Dartmouth in the Rose Bowl?

In 1937, Dartmouth was a major college football powerhouse and was invited to play Cal in the Rose Bowl on January 1st--and Dartmouth turned it down. It is hard to imagine both sides of that sentence: Dartmouth invited to the Rose Bowl? A major college football program turning down "the granddaddy of them all"? Presumably the payout wasn't quite the equivalent of the $22.3 million that Wisconsin and Stanford will reportedly each collect for participating this year.

Dartmouth went undefeated in 1937 with six wins and two ties. According to the 1938 Aegis, "pre-season predictions of the gridsters went no further than the term 'dark-horse,'" but the team made up for scant experience with speed and strength.

President Ernest Hopkins response to the Rose Bowl invitation is a testament to his view of student athletes:

To carry our football season over until the first of the year and end it up with the distractions of a jaunt across the continent and return, would force us into the position where all members of the team would be penalized in lower grades, which they inevitably would get and which might endanger the academic standing of some of them, or else put us into the position of having to extend special privilege to members of the team in the consideration which should be given to them.

In other words, it might hurt the young men's studies.  The same year, Hopkins declined an offer by the Chicago Bears to play a benefit game for Chicago's Hull House at Wrigley or Soldier Field.

Interestingly, the school's worry about the disruptive nature of post season athletics did not carry over to other sports: in 1942, Dartmouth reached the finals of the NCAA Basketball Tournament.

To see the letters, ask for the "Athletics" file from DP-11, Box 6980.

Not "A Christmas Carol"

Everybody knows the classic tale of Ebenezer Scrooge and the three ghosts of Christmas whose visitations cause the former miser and all around misanthrope to reform. The other novellas of Christmas penned by Charles Dickens have not stood the test of time as well, perhaps due to lack of such memorable characters like old Mr. Fezziwig.

The first followup to A Christmas Carol (London: Chapman & Hall, 1843) was The Chimes (London: Chapman and Hall, 1845). Despite the inevitable happy ending, this story is a bleaker, more pointed critique of social issues of the 1840s. The goblins in the tale offer the main character glimpses of his family's potential future - each an illustration of how seemingly good people can become trapped in a cycle of evil.

The Cricket On The Hearth (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1846) is the third in the sequence. After several trials and tribulations, the spirit of the hearth cricket reminds the various characters of their potential for good and the futility of suspecting the worst of others.

The Battle Of Life (London: Bradbury & Evans, 1846) omits the supernatural elements of the first three tales and instead focuses on the selfless acts of the daughters of the cynical Doctor Jeddler. Their devotion and caring brings about a change in his view of the world.

The final novella is The Haunted Man And The Ghost's Bargain (London: Bradbury & Evans, 1848). In this story, Dickens reenlists the aid of a supernatural entity to bring about the redemption of the main character whose initial bargain with his ghostly double to remove all painful memories brings calamity on all others he interacts with as they are also shorn of any unwanted thoughts, leaving them thoughtless and cruel. The lost memories and human feeling of all are returned through the inherent goodness of Milly Swidger whose own painful memories are the source of her benevolence.

Ask for Rare Book PR 4557 .C58 1843 (A Christmas Carol), Rare Book PR 4557 .C5 1845 (The Chimes), Rare Book PR 4572 .C78 1846 (The Cricket On The Hearth), Val 826 D55 O53 (The Battle Of Life), and Rare Book PR 4557 .H3 1848 (The Haunted Man and The Ghost's Bargain).

Dear Dr. Seuss

Like the rest of the country, we have had school children on our minds this week. We were reminded of a batch of very sweet letters in our Ted Geisel collection addressed to Dr. Seuss. It seemed like a good time to share a few, as well as one of Seuss's replies.

To see all of the letters, ask for MS-1100, Box 1, Folder 8.

Nature Printing

Natural history in the nineteenth century strove to describe and classify everything in the living world. Museums were bulging at the seams with specimens and catalogs listing and illustrating classes of life proliferated. For some in the field, traditional illustration techniques were frustratingly inadequate for the level of precision and detail they were after: they wanted to show nature in all of her wonder. We have written before of one obsessive attempt to bring nature into book form with As Nature Shows Them: Moths and Butterflies of the United States which used the cells from butterfly wings to color the images.

We recently acquired a similarly passionate quest for botanical realism: Thomas Moore's The Ferns of Great Britain and Ireland (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1855). The book employs a process dubbed "Nature Printing" that involved pressing an actual fern into soft lead then electoplating the impression to create an intaglio printing plate. The fern itself created the illustration and the effect is stunning. The book appears to be a collection of actual fern pressed into paper, but with colors that have not faded.

Another book in the collection takes this hyper-realism even further. Romeyn Hough's The American Woods, Exhibited by Actual Specimens and with Copious Explanatory Notes (Lowville: By the Author, 1888-1904) uses 750 paper-thin wood samples carefully mounted in cardboard cards to show the wood grains of hundreds of native trees.

To see a little nature in Rauner, ask for Rare QK527.M8 1855 and Rare SD536.H83.