Before the Book Arts Workshop

The Book Arts Workshop in Baker Berry is one of the most loved spaces on campus. Students and community members can learn to set type, print something cool, and even bind it. It has been around in various forms since the late 1930s starting its life as the "Graphic Arts Workshop." Answering a reference question earlier this week, we stumbled on a tantalizing bit of the Workshop's prehistory in the activities of the "Daniel Oliver Associates."

In 1934, a group of students enrolled in Art 58 formed a book collecting club. They took as their namesake a Dartmouth alumnus, Daniel Oliver, from the class of 1785. Daniel had donated his large personal collection of books to the young Dartmouth Library while he was still a student. The group devoted their meetings to discussing book collecting with visiting practitioners of the book arts. Then they decided to try their hand at printing a book. They worked with Harold Rugg in the Library to secure rights to three poems by Robert Frost. According to the 1935 Library Bulletin, they set the type by hand, printed 125 copies of the book in the Library. We can't be sure, but this may mark the first bit of student printing to occur in the Dartmouth Library, and perhaps it served as inspiration for the thriving Books Arts Workshop we know today.

The Daniel Oliver Associates were kind enough to donate copy number one of their book to the Library and Frost inscribed the book to Baker Memorial Library on the title page. You can see the signed copy by asking for Frost PS3511 .R94T5 1935. There is also some correspondence between Harold Rugg and Frost in our Robert Frost Papers, MS-1178, Box 9, Folder 30. The minutes and constitution of the Daniel Oliver Associates in DO-67, Box 6600.

Earthsea at Dartmouth

In 1980, the British director Michael Powell came to Dartmouth as its Artist-in-Residence. Powell had
been in the picture business in one form or another since 1925, beginning to direct projects in the 1930s. By the time of his visit, he had made many successful movies, five of which remain on the British Film Institute's Top 100 British Films list. 

While at Dartmouth, he would develop a small-scale project with a group of students: a scene from Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea Cycle. LeGuin's classic fantasy series was one that Powell had been interested in adapting previously, and it made for a good opportunity to give students hands-on experience with the film-making process under the guidance of a seasoned director. The final film is lost, but you can see pieces of it, along with behind-the-scenes footage and Powell's own thoughts on the series and film-making in a brief documentary from our collections, digitized here.

For the Earthsea fans, you can read the script for the film, adapted from a scene in The Tombs of Atuan, in the Film and Media Studies records. Ask for DA-815, Box 31316, Folder 9.

The Business is Suffering

Special Collections is more than just old books and dusty manuscripts. We also actively collect books created by contemporary artists who use the format of the book as their medium to explore deeper concepts while challenging societal expectations of how information is disseminated and received. One such book is The Business is Suffering (2003).

Made by Maureen Cummins, with typographic assistance from Kathy McMillan, this sobering project was inspired by a collection of letters found by the artist in the archive of the American Antiquarian Society. The letters are part of their Slavery in the U. S. collection and are concerned with the profitable business of trafficking humans between 1846 and 1863.

Cummins's artistic reproduction of the texts, one per folio, is juxtaposed with an image of human silhouettes whose numbers are inexorably diminished with each turn of a page. The silence of the enslaved is deafening when contrasted with the brisk and commonplace tone of the mirroring correspondence. 

To sit down with this moving and disturbing work, come to Special Collections and ask to see Presses C915cubu.

Steel!

If you follow this blog, you may have noticed that we are a bit nutty over early Soviet book design. Their modernist aesthetic combined with a celebration of the proletariat and the wonders of the machine age are so over the top they can't help but grab your attention. You add in a dose of hindsight (uh, that "utopia" was kind of a sham, and, well, there is Stalin...) and the unreality steeped in hyper realism strikes a cord of awe.

One of our latest additions is a brag book about the Soviet steel industry. Kachestvennai︠a︡ stalʹ SSSR (Moscow, 1935) makes its point immediately. It is bound in two sheets of high-quality steel engraved with the title. You open it up, and there, silhouetted with another sheet of steel between two cut sheets of paper, is Stalin admiring an info-graphic showing the impressive growth of steel production between 1927-1934.

You have to see it to believe it. Come in and ask for Rare Z246 .T45 1935.

A Man of Influence

Romain Rolland (1866-1944) was a renowned novelist, pacifist, vegetarian, and mystic whom you've likely never heard of unless you are an aficionado of early 20th-century Nobel Prize winners. Nevertheless, despite Rolland's marked absence from today's zeitgeist, he brushed elbows and had close friendships with an impressive list of notables from all walks of life. For example, he was a pen pal with conductor Richard Strauss and psychologist Sigmund Freud, was named as the dedicatee of Herman Hesse's Siddhartha, wrote a book on Mahatma Gandhi and then met the Indian leader, and attempted to intervene with Josef Stalin on behalf of his activist friends who opposed the dictator.

Ultimately, perhaps Rolland's star has waned in our time because of that last association: despite Rolland being characterized as a moral compass for Western culture both during and between World War I and World War II, his staunch adulation of Stalin well through the Second World War earned him rebuke and criticism from his peers.

Here at Rauner, we have a small but interesting collection of photographs taken of Rolland and various individuals, including Maxim Gorky and Mahatma Gandhi. To look through them, come to Special Collections and ask for Iconography 1505.

New Exhibit: "Histories Unheard"

This summer we celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Dartmouth Library’s Historical Accountability Student Research Program (HASRP). For the last five years, the program has been sponsored by the Provost’s Office under the auspices of the campus-wide Inclusive Excellence initiative. Born in the summer of 2018, the program initially provided for three competitive and fully funded fellowships, with an additional fourth fellowship funded every year through the generosity of the Sphinx Foundation. To date, the program has supported twenty undergraduate fellows and numerous interns, all of whom have conducted independent archival research related to issues of equity, diversity, and inclusion in Dartmouth College’s past.

Our innovative and dynamic program offers an open-ended scope for project topics. The program’s goal is not to create a definitive report or scholarly publication but instead to provide student researchers with hands-on experience conducting archival research and to keep the dialogue about historical accountability alive and moving forward. It is an ongoing conversation about our institution’s historical accountability, and not a conclusion or referendum.

So, although the program has been a great success so far, there is still much work to be done. Thanks to guaranteed funding from Dartmouth’s Office for Institutional Diversity and Equity, the Library will continue to provide opportunities for students to practice archival research skills while blazing trails into IDE issues for future researchers and scholars. Please celebrate the success of the program with us by exploring this exhibit that highlights the projects and research of select interns and fellows from the first five years of its existence.

This exhibit was curated by Val Werner '21, Historical Accountability Student Research Program Coordinator, and Morgan Swan, the Special Collections Librarian for Teaching and Scholarly Engagement. The poster was designed by Samantha Milnes, Collection Management Assistant at Rauner Special Collections Library. The exhibit will be on display in Rauner Special Collections Library's Class of 1965 Galleries from June 19, 2023, until September 15, 2023. Learn more by visiting the exhibit website.

Not THAT Josiah Bartlet

Dartmouth counts many famous people connected to the school. For the Fourth of July this year, we feature Josiah Bartlett... no, not the fictional one "t" President Bartlet on West Wing who taught economics here, but his actual namesake, two "tt" Josiah Bartlett, first Governor of the State of New Hampshire, the state's delegate to the Continental Congress and signer of the Declaration of Independence. A successful doctor, he was also a trustee of Dartmouth and was awarded an honorary degree at the 1790 graduation where he spoke.

We have a wonderful stash of letters in his papers (MS-181) that includes this gem perfect for the day. Writing to Bartlett from Exeter in August, 1776, Nathaniel Folsom enthuses:

The Declaration is well receivd here, has been duely published etc. As to myself and some of my particular friends with whom I have the happiness to agree in almost every publick measure it was extremely agreeable--it will (I doubt not) have a happy tendency to unite us in the present glorious struggle for by it many of the objections of wavering (tho' perhaps otherwise well disposed) persons are entirely answered--In short, it is the first principle of every virtuous man to keep a conscience void of offense toward God & man, it is the second thing he has in view to make it appear to the World. By the Declaration you make evident to the World that you are neither ashamed to own the Cause of Liberty nor afraid to defend it, and I doubt not it will be defended even against the Ultimo Ratio Regis.

The last line a reference to the news of most of the remainder of the letter which was almost exclusively concerned with the state of the troops, the building of a new fort and equipping a powder mill. We will be closed for the Fourth, but come in this week and look over Bartlett's communications as the country formed.