Global Geography

While searching the stacks for materials related to regional agriculture, we discovered a University of Chicago PhD dissertation among the collections. The text, titled "The Evolution of Land Utilization in Lebanon, New Hampshire," was written by Edward Nathaniel "Nat" Torbert, a member of the Dartmouth class of 1925. The data in this tome, which is nearly three inches thick, explores the ins and outs of farming from 1800 up to the date of its composition.

Although Torbert's research is interesting, especially when discussing the move from rural to urban environments in the 1800s, we were most fascinated by the photographic prints that he pasted into the pages of his
dissertation. Images of White River Junction, West Lebanon, and Lebanon abound, and each one provides a captivating portal back to life in a small rural town in the 1920s. Perhaps the photos are so particularly compelling because Torbert went on to be an award-winning amateur photographer.

Torbert was evidently a man meant to be outdoors and in the field. He initially was a professor of geography at San Jose State College, but soon shifted into a more active role: he worked with the Tennessee Valley Authority for several years before moving into successive international positions that revolved around his specialty in economic geography. From 1950 to 1951, he worked on a reclamation program in Haiti. Soon after, Torbert headed to Afghanistan as the chief planning engineer for an irrigation project that was meant to bring water to 3.5 million acres of farmland.

However, after only a few months there, he contracted bulbar polio, a particularly nasty variant of the disease which attacks the brain stem. At first, he and Elise, his wife, assumed that he had the flu. Within two days, his arms and vocal cords were paralyzed. A week later, after being airlifted out of the country on board the US Ambassador's plane, Torbert passed away in the Seventh Day Adventist hospital in Karachi, Pakistan. In a letter home, his wife said that she was "not prepared for the rapid progress of the disease nor for its fatality," that Norbert never regained consciousness enough to realize he had polio, and that "he remained sweet, patient and cheerful until the very end." Soon after, the United States Department of the Interior awarded him its highest honor, the Distinguished Service Award. At the awards convocation, Douglas McKay, Secretary of the Interior, described Torbert as "broad in his thinking, considerate in his approach, firm in his beliefs, skillful in his operations, and unyielding in his devotion to purpose."

To see Nat Torbert's dissertation, including some amazing views of early 20th-century Lebanon, ask for Alumni T63e.

Telegraphing the Play

On November 7th, 1908, Dartmouth squared off against Princeton at the famed Polo Grounds for "the only big football game that New Yorkers [could] witness" that year. Obviously, most Dartmouth students couldn't make the trip down to New York for the game, but they were anxious about the fate of their team. So a telegraph machine was set up in the gymnasium and a telegraph operator, "Miss Rodey," received 114 telegrams sent directly from the game that detailed every play.

The D from November 10, 1908, sets the scene pretty well:

A large crowd gathered in the Gym last Saturday afternoon to hear the reports from the game in New York. These came by direct wire from the Polo Grounds, and were by far the most complete and accurate received this year. Each play was carefully transmitted, and the location of the ball was always stated at the end of each scrimmage. This enabled the following of the game on the diagram board with unusual precision.

Get this... Someone saved all of those telegrams and had them beautifully bound and presented to the Library in 1916. You can come in and relive the game, play by play, by flipping through the series of transmissions. The internet has nothing on Dartmouth in 1908.

Ask for DC History GV957.D3D3 1908.

From the Library of...

Just recently, our processing specialist undertook the daunting task of reprocessing the Bookplates Collection at Rauner Library. The collection contains more than twenty thousand bookplates, a few bookplate sale catalogs, brochures, leaflets, and Harold Goddard Rugg's correspondence with dealers and collectors. The collection began in 1928 when Josiah Minot Fowler, a member of Dartmouth College's class of 1900, donated the F. J. Libbie collection of bookplates to Dartmouth College. He also commissioned two brass plates dedicating his gift to the memory of his parents George R. Fowler and Isabel Minot Fowler. Fowler’s gift contained about 3,900 early American plates, 3,000 modern American plates, 250 American proofs, 300 Canadian plates and about 7,500 English and foreign plates. Each plate was mounted on white cards, arranged alphabetically and stamped with Fowler's name.

In 1945, Arthur F. Gray and Arthur H. Gray 1911, donated their collection of bookplates which contained about 8,000 plates. That donation was facilitated by Bremer Whidden Pond, a member of the class of 1906. Each of the plates were mounted on gray cards, stamped "Gray," and interfiled with the existing Fowler collection. Since 1945, other bookplates have been added to the collection, including donations by Dr. Mary Adams in 1969, and by Harold G. Rugg, who also solicited additional bookplates from donors and bought many from dealers. Some of the more notable bookplates are shown here and include Rudyard Kipling, Charles Dickens, William Butler Yeats, and Robert Frost. Other notable bookplates in the collection once belonged to Charlie Chaplin, most of the Founding Fathers (including Hamilton and Washington), and FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt.

The finding aid for the collection isn't public-facing yet. Until it is, you can look through the bookplates of notable figures by coming to Special Collections and asking to see MS-1137, Box 42.

Dartmouth's Vermont Thanksgiving

It was the middle of the American Revolution. Thomas Chittenden, "Governor and Commander in Chief" of the recently formed "State of Vermont" (really more a republic, separate from the thirteen colonies, but fighting alongside them in the Revolution), issued a proclamation of Thanksgiving. It directed the people of Vermont to lay down all labor on Thursday, November 26, 1778, and embrace a day of thanksgiving for all the good that had arisen "amid the many private and public Distresses of a temporal Nature."

Chittenden issued the proclamation in Windsor, Vermont, but it was printed here at Dartmouth by Alden Spooner, during the brief period when Hanover flipped its allegiance to Vermont and called itself "Dresden, Vermont." Spooner made an egregious typo working in his dark quarters in Dartmouth Hall: Chittenden sprouted an extra T in his name.

Even now, when the Christian god is still routinely evoked in political discourse, the utter disregard of anything resembling a separation of church and state is a bit shocking. Of course there wasn't the Constitution yet, and the governor was comfortable ordering the citizens of the state to pause from their regular duties to "pay their vows to the LORD," and give thanks for "God's gracious Presence with the General Assembly of the United States of America.... That this once howling Wilderness may, in a spiritual Sense, bud and blossom like the Rose."

Come in and take a look at our copy, docketed Dartmouth College, by asking for Broadside 778568.

Inconceivable!

Even though he wrote many popular screenplays and books, including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the Presidents Men, William Goldman, who died today at the age of 87, will probably be best remembered for the adaptation of his book The Princess Bride. The quirky tale of pirates, princesses, giants and the power of love was made into a movie by Rob Reiner in 1987.

However, Goldman’s original adaptation dates to 1973. Several attempts to get the project off the ground were in the works throughout the 1970s and early '80s but the movie wasn't made until Reiner, coming off directorial success in both This is Spinal Tap and Stand by Me, became involved.

We recently reprocessed the papers of director, screenwriter and producer James Goldstone and among the many scripts in the collection we found the second draft of Goldman’s original adaptation of The Princess Bride, dated December 1974. Unfortunately, there was no supporting material accompanying the script and so it is left to our imagination why Goldstone had a copy in his possessions.

Was he one of the many people involved in trying to get the movie made, back in the day? Maybe he was considering directing it? Or maybe it was just another script making the rounds in Hollywood.

Having read the script, I can report that the final product is pretty close to this original.

If you would like to read the screenplay for yourself, ask for MS-1073, The Papers of James Goldstone.

"Splendid" Lillard

Dartmouth's recent football victory over Harvard, after several decades of agonizing defeats, brought to mind another time long ago when Dartmouth was king of the gridiron and its students were scholar-athletes in the truest sense. One of those men was Walter H. Lillard, known as "Cappy" to many, a member of Dartmouth's class of 1905. Among his many exceptional accomplishments, Lillard was on the Dartmouth football team that notched the college's first-ever victory against Harvard in 1903. Lillard, although being a bit small for a football player, still put on a performance in the left end position that the Dartmouth called "splendid." The memory of Dartmouth's stunning shut-out of Harvard that year must have been in the minds of the men who hired Lillard to be the assistant football coach for two years after he graduated. Phillips Academy in Andover soon poached him to serve as their football coach as well as teach English Literature; by doing so, he became the first faculty member at the school also to serve as football coach. Eventually, Dartmouth was able to lure him back to campus in 1908 as the head coach.

After receiving an A. M. from Dartmouth in 1910, Lillard returned to Phillips Academy, Andover, to coach and teach English. Lillard found the hierarchy of American college sports, with its designation of varsity and junior varsity, to be distasteful. He soon instituted a policy at Andover that required all students to participate in athletics of some kind. Six years later, he accepted the position of principal at Tabor Academy in Marion, Massachusetts, where he served for twenty-six years.

In addition to his  school responsibilities, Lillard was very active in his community, serving as Civil Defense director, chairman of the Red Cross chapter and a member of the board of library trustees and school building committee. In 1945 he was appointed American field representative in Vienna, Austria, where he worked with the Intergovernmental Committee of Refugees. We have his passport from his trip to Europe, and the photo in it suggests that the United States government back then was less stringent about what sorts of photographs were acceptable for official documents.

To look through more of W. H. Lillard's papers, come to Rauner and ask to see MS-1159. The early 20th-century copies of the Dartmouth are on the reading room shelf, if you want to read all about how the football team trounced Harvard for the first time so many years ago.

Encyclopedic Enlightenment

Denis Diderot's Enyclopédie, ou dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers, a mammoth undertaking that was launched in 1751 and took over twenty years to complete, is arguably one of the most famous encyclopedias ever made. The work ticks a lot of boxes for people who love "firsts," as nebulous as such claims may be: first to include contributions from a wide number of well-known people such as Voltaire and Rousseau, and first general encyclopedia to describe the mechanical arts. Diderot's work is also hailed as representing the intellectual thought of the Enlightenment, and is sometimes credited as an inspiration for the French Revolution because of his and others' entries on political authority.

Here in Special Collections, we're fortunate enough to have a complete set of the Encyclopédie and we also have a facsimile of the prospectus. Sent out as a way to drum up financial support in advance of the actual publication, the prospectus promised a ten-volume work with a clearly defined finish. Ultimately, however, the sprawling encyclopedia swelled to twenty-eight volumes, frustrating its subscribers and even causing a few lawsuits along the way (as well as a run-in with the royal censors).

To see our copy of the Encyclopédie, come to Rauner and ask for Rare AE25 .E53. To see our prospectus facsimile, ask for Rare AE25 .E25 1751a.