Contending Forces: A Novel for Social Change

We just acquired a copy of Pauline Hopkins's Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (Boston: Colored Co-operative Publishing Co., 1900). As the title suggests, this is a novel bent on affecting social change. Hopkins was a prolific and popular writer of the turn of the century. Much of her work appeared in Colored American Magazine, where she worked as an editor, and she published several full-length novels. Her writings positioned her as a major public intellectual of the time.

What makes our copy particularly interesting is two letters laid in, one, a fair copy written by Emma S. Burnett of Kalispell, Montana, praising Hopkins for the book.

I have just finished reading your most interesting book "Contending Forces." it is grand. I wish every man and woman in the universe might read it. Especially of the more favored race for surely then they could not help but look upon us with more favor. We are living almost at the two extremes of this country yet your forceful words have come to us on the western side of the Rockies. I shall do all I can to have my friends in this section secure a copy as I feel that it will be food & strength for them. One of your own townsmen whom I met while visiting Boston last Sept sent me the book. I will once more pass my tribute of thanks to you for the good work you have done for the race.

Hopkins's answer lies along side. In a neat script (she earned her living for a time as a stenographer at M.I.T.), she thanks Burnett for her words of encouragement and answers in the rhetoric of struggle and purpose:

Sometimes one becomes discouraged and is unable to see any good accomplished by the most faithful work. Your letter found me at such a time, and it has strengthened me to press forward in the good fight that we are all waging against wrong and oppression.

The voices of the two women united in cause, one in Boston, the other in Montana, help to carry today's reader into the social world that the text was responding to and trying to change.

You can see it by asking for Rare PS1999.H4226 1900.

The Dartmouth Murders

While Dartmouth has had its share of real murders, this particular Dartmouth Murders, is the title of a work of fiction, possibly the first work of murder mystery fiction to feature the College, at least in book form. The story was perpetrated by Clifford Orr, Class of 1922, who would have lived through a real murder at the College in his sophomore year, but that’s a different story!

Clifford’s fictional murder is nothing like the real one. Instead it starts with the main character, Kenneth Harris, finding the body of his roommate hanging by his neck from the fire escape (in those days the fire escape was a rope that student would have to shimmy down in the event of a blaze). What appears at first to be a suicide quickly turns more sinister.

Orr first published the piece in serial form in College Humor under the title "The Dartmouth Mystery," though there is little if any humor in his piece. The story was then picked up by Farrar and Rinehart in the company’s inaugural year (1929) and made into a book. While Orr went on to publish another mystery with them, The Wailing Rock Murders, his final book, allegedly set on the Cornell campus, never made it into print. The Dartmouth Murders was made into a movie in 1935, titled A Shot in the Dark. The New York Times panned the movie version for which Orr wrote the script.

The Dartmouth Murders is full of familiar Dartmouth locations and references. For instance Kenneth Harris is a resident of North Mass, just as Clifford Orr was as a student. But when the clock strikes the hour it is not the Baker Tower clock as it would be today, but the Dartmouth Hall clock (Baker hadn’t been built when Orr was a student). Webster Hall, the Chapel and the Inn also get at least passing mention. Hanover establishments of yore also make appearances, The Dartmouth National Bank and Campion’s for instance, but ultimately the book is more about the mystery and Dartmouth is very much a backdrop.

In addition to several copies of the book, some signed by the author, we also have the original manuscript as well as Orr’s own letters home to his mother during his years at Dartmouth.

Orr, who started out as a literary associate at Doubleday, Dorn & Co., and later became a literary editor at The New Yorker, also published some short literary pieces in The New Yorker and wrote song lyrics. He died in Hanover in 1951 after “a long illness” at the age of 51.

To read The Dartmouth Murders, ask for: DC History, PZ3.O749 Dar or Rauner Alumni O75d
To see the College Humor version of the story ask for: DC History PZ3 .O749da
To see Orr’s papers and the manuscript version of the novel, ask for: MS-532
To watch A Shot in the Dark, go to Jones Media Center and ask for: Jones Media DVD 8519

Of Devotion and Care

Bound in a gilded, but otherwise unassuming, contemporary calfskin binding, this little book seems much like any other until you open to the title page. At this point it becomes obvious that you are not looking at a normal book. What might at first glance appear to be text and image printed in red ink quickly resolves itself into an intricately cut page. Yes, cut. Each letter in this book, which measures 3 ¾ x 2 ¾ inches, been cut through the vellum and then a piece of colored silk has been inserted between the pages. The intricate carvings appear, due to the variations in the size and angle of the letters, to have been hand cut without the use of a stencil or guide. The silk backings include red, green, yellow, blue and black.

So what is it and why? Unfortunately we know little about this book. It is dedicated to and executed for Philip III of Spain and bears his coat-of-arms on the title page. The text, a collection of church and private prayers in Latin, is likely the work of the Dominican monk Diego de Barrada who probably did it to show his devotion and loyalty to the king. The book was completed in ca. 1600 as a gift to King Philip III. Beyond this, we don't know much about this book, nor has anyone on our staff seen a similar example.

Ask for Codex 001599.

You can also read about a more modern take on negative space in an earlier post.

Doodling Twain

At last week's annual conference of the Society of Authorship, Reading & Publishing (SHARP), there was a panel titled "The Alchemy of the Page: Transforming Image and Text." One paper described Mark Twain's use of imagery in King Leopold's Soliloquy while the second paper was on the many marginal doodles left behind by Max Beerbohm and G. K. Chesterfield. The panel reminded us of our original manuscript of Chapter Sixteen of Mark Twain's A Tramp Abroad that is full of Twain's doodles.

While Twain wrote he flipped over his sheets and indulged in a little mental free play. The manuscript contains two sketches of elephants then a sketch of a gentleman being dragged from the customs house by an elephant's trunk. The image leaves much of the action off page.  Twain wrote a sketch, "A Stolen White Elephant," for A Tramp Abroad that was not included in the final version, but as far as we can tell, this text has nothing to do with elephants. Of course, good doodles almost always hide their meanings.

To see if you can make anything of this text/image interplay, ask for Codex MS 002470.

Scenes From the Sea

Augustus Alexander Warren was a warrant officer with the United States Navy in the mid-1800s. He was born to a French mother and an English father in Havre, France, in February of either 1826 or 1827. When a young man, Warren emigrated to Kittery, Maine, where he became a U.S. citizen in 1853 and received his commission as a sail-maker with the Navy the same year. Soon after, he set to sea on the USS Decatur to defend Seattle against "all the Indians occupying the Northern portion of the United States." Warren also sailed in support of the Charles Francis Hall Arctic expedition in 1871 and along the coast of South America in the 1880s.

The Warren Papers are a wonderful example of the wondrous variety that can be enclosed within a single-box collection and of the fascinating lives that can be explored through the breadth of documents found therein. Among other things, this box contains the original manuscripts of Warren's sea adventures, his official papers of citizenship and naval commission (the latter signed by Franklin Pierce), many of his letters home, and daguerreotypes of him and two other family members.

Despite these interesting items, what we found most striking are the numerous pencil drawings, some colored and others not, that are a significant part of the collection. As a sail-maker, Warren was by necessity an amateur draftsman; his logbook is filled with precise geometrical illustrations of the numerous types of sails required by navy ships at the time, complete with highly detailed measurements and instructions for constructing them aboard ship. These drawings are complemented by thrilling scenes of ships amid icebergs and touching images of an imagined reunion with his wife upon his eventual return home.

To explore the rich and fascinating depths of one ordinary man's life, humbly contained within a single box, ask at Rauner for MS-868 Box 1. A finding aid for the collection is available.

"A Seventeenth-Century Emblem Book"

Last week, Dick Hoefnagel, a longtime friend of the Dartmouth College Library, passed away. In his memory, today we blog one of his favorite books from the collection: one he admired, wrote about, and connected with personally. The book is an exquisitely executed seventeenth-century emblem book with hand-colored engravings and text in manuscript.

According to Hoefnagel's research published in the Library Bulletin 11/1 (November 1970), the engravings were signed by Jean Dolivar, a Spanish artist born in 1641, and the nephew of Jean Lepaute, one of the great masters of the Louis XIV style. Illustrated here is Emblem I described by Dick thusly:

This emblem contrasts the perishable felicities of life on earth with the eternal bliss of heaven. The symbolism is conventional and includes the ancient belief that laurel, usually representing virtue, is never struck by lightning. The choice of the number twelve in the crown of stars may have a biblical derivation (the tiara of the traveling woman of St. John, Revelation 12:1-6; the twelve patriarchs of Israel) or refer to the ultimate origin of such symbolisms, namely the astrological system of the twelve constellations of the Zodiac.

It is a beautiful book and worth your time. Come in and ask for Codex Manuscript 002066.

A Personal Letter from Beethoven

When the name Beethoven is mentioned, you probably think of one of his many compositions and start humming. You think about him being deaf when he composed the Symphony No. 9 in D minor. You might even think about the mystery woman - his "Immortal Beloved." And that's usually where it stops. Right?

Rauner has one letter from Beethoven to Christoph August Tiedge from September, 1811. It's a small window into Beethoven's personal life and his interactions with friends and acquaintances. In it he discusses his meeting with Tiedge and bemoans the fact that they did not become friends sooner. He  writes "Every day I blow myself up for not having to got to know you sooner at Teplitz" and goes on to mention that he would like to "hop over to the capital of Saxony" to see Tiedge again and that he has decided not to visit his patron the Archduke.

...I received a letter from my gracious and musical Archduke saying that...he was letting me decide whether I should go to him or not. Well, I put the best construction on this in accordance with my intentions and desires; and that is why you see I am still here...

Beethoven then rambles on a bit about his room-mate having "got lost today...and so I could not claim his company." He closes with "I am expecting at least one word without any reserve, chiefly because I can take it."

The letter is in German, but a transcription is housed with the manuscript.  Ask for Mss 811506.