Gentleman's "C"

One of the concerns raised in the recent "Moving Dartmouth Forward" report concerned the excessive grade inflation that has infected Dartmouth and the rest of higher education. There is a call for stricter grading to counter the rash of "A" grades. Dartmouth students today would be appalled by the grades their peers received in 1925.

Amid some worry that certain departments and divisions were looser in their grading than others, in 1926 the Board of Trustees received reports on academic performance across campus. In the Fall term of 1925, only 8% of all grades were an "A," and only 23% a "B."  But 41% of all grades were a "C."  It was easiest to pull an "A" in Fine Arts (a whopping 19.3%) and hardest in the "Special Freshman Courses" (just 3%). 35.5% of all grades doled out in the Ancient Languages and Literatures departments were a "D"--and that department gave more failures than "A" grades.  Overall GPA in Fall of 1925? That would be 2.028... and just 1.847 for freshman. Gentlemen, you earned your "C."

To see the report, ask for DA-1, Box 1484, folder 87.

Valentine from the Home Front

The World War II years in Hanover were marked by a sense of urgency. As young men prepared to ship out and serve, the climate became one of "eat, drink, be merry, tomorrow we die." That's how Mary Mecklin Jenkins remembered it, at least. Mary was one of many young women who met her husband - John Jenkins '43 - and fell in love during those war years, and she and he reminisced in an interview with the Dartmouth College Oral History Program in 2007, more than 60 years after the fact.

Mary was a student at Skidmore College in 1942, when she returned home to Hanover to work for her father, a sociology professor, for the summer. She was dating Ernest Hemingway's son, Jack, at the time, but after a falling out with Jack led to the prospect of a dateless weekend, she agreed to attend a party with John, whom she had met several days earlier. Their practical date of convenience turned into something much more meaningful. As John said in the 2007 interview, "The chemistry started to take…63 years later, here we are with four kids and eight grandchildren."

Although John joined the Army in December 1942 and spent that first Christmas in a training camp far from Mary, the couple married in February 1944 and reunited for good in 1946 at the end of John's service. To hear their full interview, visit John & Mary's oral history page. For more World War II love stories, browse the husband/wife interviews in "The War Years at Dartmouth" collection.

Happy Valentine's Day, from Rauner to you!

Fludd

We got to Robert Fludd through Thomas Cromwell.  It doesn't make much sense at first (but neither did Fludd most of the time). Really, it is Hilary Mantel's fault.  While waiting for the third part of the Wolf Hall trilogy to come out, we read her older books, including Fludd. That made us wonder about the real Fludd which brought us to his Philosophia Moysaica (Gouda: Petrus Rammazenius, 1638).

He is not a charismatic clergyman who seduces nuns as Mantel paints him. But he has a lot of cool diagrams that somehow seek to explain the connections between the heavens and the earth, God and Man, the macrocosm and the microcosm. He also has some things to say about "weapon salve." Apparently, rubbing healing herbs on a blade that cut you will help the wound to heal (or not--it is hard to tell). Beyond that... well, come in and take a look yourself by asking for Rare Q151.F58 1638.

How the Experts Build a Snow Man

In 1951, Popular Science featured Dartmouth students under the headline “How the Experts Build a Snow Man.” That year's Winter Carnival snow sculpture was the Alpendoodler, an odd little man blowing an enormous alpenhorn. The sculpture was formed with wire mesh and birch logs covered with slush.

Since the 1920s, snow sculptures on the Green have served as focal points for Winter Carnival. Each year Dartmouth students have puzzled, schemed, designed and built wondrous sculptures. They vary from the absurd to the sublime. There are feats of engineering that leave you awed, whimsy that makes you laugh, special effects to thrill, and even a Guinness World Record. We currently have some our favorite “Center of the Green” snow sculptures from 1924 to 1987 on exhibit to celebrate the artistry and expertise of Dartmouth’s snowman builders.

Come into Rauner before this year's sculpture melts to take a look!  The exhibit will run through March 1st. To see how the Popular Science article, ask for DC Hist LD1441 .E643.

Invisible Cities

Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities has inspired countless artists and intellectuals with its whimsical descriptions of imaginary cities. In his famous text, Calvino poses a fictional dialogue between 13th-century Venetian merchant Marco Polo and Emperor Kublai Khan and intersperses it between fifty-five brief prose poems describing the extraordinary and mysterious cities Marco Polo visited during his travels. Calvino stresses the constant flux between reality and fantasy and describes how “cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.”

At Rauner, we have an Arion Press edition of Invisible Cities with twelve illustrations by Wayne Thiebaud. Thiebaud’s drawings are meant to be invisible until the reader takes the action of turning the page. To realize this concept, the book was designed with the drawings printed on clear plastic in different ink colors, each matching the color of the following sheet. The images are revealed only when the transparent sheet is turned back onto the preceding page, a white sheet with printed text. This allows the drawing and the words to be read simultaneously.

To see Rauner’s Arion Press edition of Invisible Cities, ask for Presses A712cal.

First Super Bowl Party

The Super Bowl gets a lot of hype, but the first game was a kind of experiment that had poor television ratings, and didn't even sell out. So, we checked to see if Dartmouth students paid any attention to the event that would one day come to dominate the American psyche. The day after the 1967 Super Bowl, there was no mention of it in The Dartmouth, but we dug deeper and found an article on January 4th summing up the college bowl season (mentioning up-and-coming quarterbacks Steve Spurrier, Brian Griese, and Kenny Stabler--who, it noted, would "make the bigtime one of these days) that mentioned "Super Sunday" and the game between the NFL champ and the upstart AFL winner. Ridiculing the superlative, the article noted that the game on "Super-Sunday" would "probably be shown in the Super-Spaulding Auditorium on the Super-screen before a super-standing room only crowd of super punters."  It's Dartmouth's first Super Bowl party.

But what is a Super Bowl party without food?  On January 13, 1967, the Friday before the game, The D used a recipe to fill some space. "Beer Richly Flavors Potted Chuck" called for 3-4 pounds of bone-in chuck pot roast, a package of onion soup mix, a can of tomato sauce and a cup of beer. Cook until meat is fork tender and serve with, you guessed it, a "freshly poured beer or ale."

Did Dartmouth men really make a beer and onion soup mix pot roast for the first Super Bowl? The archival record fails us there

To prep for your Super Bowl party, take a look at The D from January 1967.  (As a bonus, you'll also find pictures of Judy Garland shooting pool at Alpha Theta.)

Text Compression

One of the first challenges that a student new to Rauner Library must grapple with is the desire to privilege exclusively a book's content without also considering its container as well. This is especially true of our medieval texts, many of which reveal numerous clues about their cultural context through their physical presence. Details such as the size of a manuscript book, the layout of its pages, the various ink colors, and even the style of handwriting can be used to create hypotheses about the book's intended purpose and audience.

A great example of this in our collections is a pairing of identical passages from St. Jerome's Latin translation of the Bible, also known as the Vulgate. Both are written on sheets of specially prepared animal skin called vellum or parchment. Both contain the writings of an Old Testament minor prophet, specifically Zachariah 4:2-5:2. Both use the same color of ink and even the same basic script, or handwriting style. However, there are some important differences that might make it difficult for someone who is experiencing them for the first time to determine that the two texts are, in fact, identical.

For one, the texts are very different in size. The first two images above are of the first text, which is over 700 pages in length, nearly five inches tall, and contains written text which is so small as to be nearly unreadable. The second text, at left, is over a foot tall (close to 14"). However, the larger page contains only a few verses of text, while the equivalent page in the smaller text compresses those same verses into a space barely an inch tall. Such physical discrepancies provide us, and the students, with the opportunity to ask important questions: Why is the first scribe's handwriting so small? Why are there two sizes of handwriting in the second manuscript? Why is there so much room in the margins of the second text, compared to the first? All of these questions draw attention away from the actual content of the manuscript text, which is unreadable anyways to many students, and instead encourage students to think about the larger world in which these books were made and once lived. We won't ruin it by giving you the answers, just like we wouldn't for our students, but we encourage you to come by Rauner, explore these two beautiful manuscripts side by side, and come up with your own conclusions. If you want to cheat a little bit, you can read an earlier blog post about the first one.

The first text can be requested by its call number, Manuscript Codex 003202.
The second text is Manuscript 002279.