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.

Cloud Computing

In September, 1940, during a meeting of the American Mathematical Society, George Stibitz publicly demonstrated remote data processing for the first time. His "Complex Computer" at Bell Telephone's New York laboratory was able to process queries and return solutions to several problems as entered by an operator in Hanover, NH. The user in Hanover typed in the calculation to be performed on a keyboard identical to one in New York. The keystrokes made in Hanover were transmitted via telegraph to New York where they were manipulated by the computer to produce a solution. The completed solution was then transmitted back to Hanover to be printed by the remote terminal.

Relay Rack for the
Complex Computer

 The "Complex Computer" was so named as it had been specifically designed to handle calculations involving complex numbers. Stibitz felt that a mechanical means of computing was not flexible enough to handle this type of problem but instead designed his device around telephone switching relays which could be "made to perform any strictly logical thinking" as the mathematics used to describe purely logical operations and those of relay circuits are the same. The one caveat to this proposed method was that all numbers would have to be translated into binary notation to simplify design as the relays themselves were standard 2-position relays.  Stibitz notes in the first draft of his talk that as far as he was aware this was the "first so-called 'practical' use...of binary notation."

Portion of circuit diagram
for the Complex Computer.

Ask for ML-27, Box 1 to see Stibit'z drafts of his talk as well as blueprints and notes on the Complex Computer. The slides used in the original presentation are held in Box 53. A guide to the collection is available.

Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates

From Peter Pan's Captain Hook to Pirates of the Caribbean's Captain Jack Sparrow, pirates are established and identified though their dress. The credit for the classic pirate costume (coat, boots, sash, and tricorne) could easily be given to Disney, but Disney had a source from which to draw inspiration: Howard Pyle.

Raised in the Brandywine Valley, Pyle spent his childhood in the picturesque town of Wilmington, Deleware; there, stories such as Grimm's Fairy Tales, The Arabian Nights, Robinson Crusoe, and The Tanglewood Tales fostered Pyle's imagination and creativity. After studying art under F. A. Van der Weilen, Pyle became an author/illustrator for Harpers Magazine. His first illustrated pirate tale, "Buccaneers and Marooners of the Spanish Main," was published here in the August/September 1887 issue. Pyle continued to produce pirate tales, even as he gained recognition for The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood of Great Renown, in Nottinghamshire and his King Arthur tales.

Howard Pyle spent his summers near the ocean in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, with his family; many pirates were painted during these summers. Though many of the buccaneering characters of his tales hailed from New York, Virginia, and Delaware, Pyle's pirates stuck to a dress code influenced by sixteenth century sailors and Spanish Gypsies. These clothes would have been impractical for a true pirate, but the task of the buccaneer on the page is not to climb rigging or wash the deck—Pyle's pirates job is to look distinct, exotic, and dangerous.

Pyle's pirates became iconic, changing the world's perception of what makes a pirate. Harper & Brothers was able to capitalize on Pyle's pirates' popularity by publishing his pirate tales as a collection in 1921, ten years after his death. Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates is not a complete tribute to "Father of Illustration," but does highlight his genius in creating the modern pirate.

Ask for Illus P993howp

Posted for Laura Vang '15

Sound Sampler

Edison Wax Cylinders
Charles Furlong Papers (Stef Mss 197)

Sound recordings, whether spoken word, music or field recordings have always been part of the aural landscape (well at least as long as sound recording equipment has been around). There's a natural impulse to create some lasting impression of an event or artistic achievement.

As with any medium, the method of capturing sound has evolved over time. The earliest methods (called phonautographs) recorded sound as visual lines on paper. These were replaced by Edison's wax cylinder phonograph and the gramophone.  Both used a stylus to impress a continuous groove in some malleable material  - typically wax, lead, or tin foil. The "records" that are still in use today are a direct descendant of these early formats.

Flexigraph
Great Issues (DA-12)

Standard 33 1/3 LP
Rauner Phonodisc 5

Magnetic recording technology was the next major evolution in the history of sound reproduction. Instead of capturing the vibrations as physical changes, an electrical analog of the sound was used to drive a recording head whose magnetic field varied according to the frequency and amplitude of the sound being recorded. Those magnetic imprints were then read back through a complimentary signal path. Wire recordings, reel to reel tapes and cassette tapes are all part of this format family.

10" reel to reel
WDCR tapes (uncatalogued)

Wire Recording spool
Great Issues (DA-12)

The current age of digital recording employs DACs (digital to analog converters) and ADCs (analog to digital converters) to map the analog sound waves to a stream of ones and zeros and back again. Once in the digital realm, these files are typically distributed in magnetic (hard drives) or optical (CDs) form factors - a potentially ironic nod to their ancestor formats.

Rauner holds numerous sound recordings in many different formats.  We present a limited sample of those found in various collections.