Compendium Musices

Thanks to a generous donation three years ago, we have in Rauner Library a mammoth sixteenth-century antiphonal (a manuscript book containing the choir’s part of the mass). The manuscript, produced in Spain for export, has been affectionately dubbed "the fifty cow book" because it demanded so much parchment for production.

This week we acquired a very small companion piece: a contemporary instructional manual for learning choral chanting: Compendium musices (Venice: Lucantonio, 1513).  Besides giving us insights to how our antiphonal was sung, the book is also a fine example of early printing of musical notations.

Northwest Passage

A few weeks ago, two German ships sailed from Vladivostok to Rotterdam via the Northwest Passage -- a trip envisioned for centuries but only made practical in recent years. The quest for this path to riches connecting Europe and the East occupied the imaginations of European traders for centuries. Our expansive Stefansson Collection on Polar Exploration now boasts a late-16th-century volume devoted to three voyages in search of the Northwest Passage by Willem Barentsz: Vraye Descriptions de Trois Voyages (Amsterdam: Cornille Nicholas, 1598). Barentsz, with Gerrit de Veer on board the third voyage, explored the north and made important observations on region’s climate and fauna with a special emphasis on Polar bears. He theorized that the sun's rays shining on the northern regions for six months each year would stifle any ice formation above a certain latitude and create an easily navigable open polar sea. The theory had currency for hundreds of years and fueled the search for a short, easily navigated trade route to the Orient.

The Northwest Passage was not successfully completed until Roald Amundsen traversed it over 300 years later in 1903.

13th-Century Manuscript Bible

This week we were fortunate to acquire an illuminated Vulgate Bible manuscript produced in Paris ca 1230-1240.  Portable, single-volume Bibles containing both the Old and New Testaments were an innovation of the early-13th century, and Paris was the major manufacture center for these Bibles.  This manifestation of the bible created a new way for the clergy and some wealthy lay people to interact with the text.  Rather than the "books" of the bible, this single-volume format helped to create the Book that most people today know as the Bible.

The copy we have just acquired is a somewhat lavish production, but one where the text takes primacy.  There are over 80 illuminated initials, many of them containing grotesques.

The manuscript will be available for use in Rauner Library immediately after its arrival sometime in mid October.

October 7 update: it's arrived and is ready to use!

Inauguration Day

In honor of Dr. Jim Kim's inauguration as the 17th president of Dartmouth College, we present three treasures from the College Archives central to the ceremonial life of the College.

THE DARTMOUTH CUP

The Dartmouth Cup was made in 1848 by Robert Garrard, proprietor of a London firm with a long history of creating fine silver for British monarchs. It was originally acquired by the fourth Earl of Dartmouth, becoming part of the family silver, until presented to Dartmouth College by the ninth Earl in 1969, at the College's bicentennial celebration.

Since 1983, the Dartmouth Cup has been carried by the College Usher, immediately following the head marshal who leads the academic procession. In this way, the College honors the connection between Dartmouth and the earldom, dating back to the 2nd Earl of Dartmouth, whose benefaction was acknowledged by the Rev. Eleazar Wheelock through the naming of his new college.

THE WENTWORTH BOWL

In August of 1771, Dartmouth College held its first Commencement exercises, graduating four students. New Hampshire's Royal Governor, John Wentworth, and his entourage of sixty, traveled to Hanover from Portsmouth to attend, much of the journey on rough roads and trails through wilderness.. To mark the significance of the occasion, Governor Wentworth presented a silver monteith to the Rev. Eleazar Wheelock and "to his Successors in that Office."

One of only three known Colonial American monteiths in silver, the Wentworth Bowl, created by Daniel Henchmen and engraved by Nathaniel Hurd, is the historic symbol of the Dartmouth presidency, and will be passed from President James Wright to President Jim Yong Kim at the inauguration ceremonies.

THE FLUDE MEDAL

During a trip to Europe in 1785 to solicit funds and acquire apparatus for the College, President John Wheelock received this gold and silver medallion from London broker and silversmith, John Flude. It carries the motto "Unanimity is the Strength of Society" on a relief depicting the Aesop fable of the old man and his three sons attempting to break a bundle of sticks, which could not be broken if held together, but could be broken alone.

When in academic attire, the President of the College wears the Flude Medal as a symbol of office.

First Comic Book in America

We have just acquired what is believed to be the first comic book printed in the United States: The Adventures of Mr. Obadiah Oldbuck (1842). Originally published in French in 1837 as Les Amours de M. Vieux Bois, this work is considered by historians to be the first graphic novel.

In its original form, Swiss illustrator and author Rudolph Töppfer depicted the fictional Monsieur Vieux Bois in pursuit of an elusive "ladye love" through a series of sequential drawings with accompanying captions. Over 40 pages and 188 etchings, the hero's amorous adventures take him across land and sea through one mishap after another. He fails even in several comic attempts at ending his own life.  But by story's end, the hero has vanquished his rivals and overcome all obstacles. He appears in the final frame at the church altar with his betrothed beside him, "a happy denouement." The captions pre-date the word-balloons used in later comic book format but it is the images that guide the reader through M. Vieux Bois's travails not the text.

The publication history of the text is less straightforward. Töppfer created and printed the story originally in 1827 for friends in a small press run. Later in the 1830s, a Parisian publisher Aubert printed at least two versions using two sets of engravings inspired by Töppfer's originals. In 1841, a British version -- with English language text -- appeared.  New engravings appear in this edition, and the American version -- the one that Dartmouth holds -- reproduces those British printing blocks. The Anglo-American edition credited the work to a pseudonymous Timothy Crayon, the "gypsographer," that is, the creator of the images using a specially prepared gysum paper.

Adventures marks Oldbuck's only appearance in print. Unlike most serial comics today, there were no sequels.  He does re-appear in other domains. In one instance, Union Army colonel and Civil War chronicler Thomas Wentworth Higginson invokes Oldbuck in his war diaries.

Dartmouth's holdings also include the first comic book written by an American. The Special Collections Library also holds a copy of The Fortunes of Ferdinand, the first graphical novel written in the United States.


Posted by Jay Satterfield for Mark Melchior

A Beat Classic at 50

Naked Lunch or The Naked Lunch? We have this Beat Generation classic covered both ways with our recent acquisition of signed first edition copies of William Burroughs's groundbreaking novel in its original French and American editions. Olympia Press, a Parisian publisher of pornography and avant-garde literary novels was the first to press with The Naked Lunch in 1959. An American publisher in New York, Grove Press, printed its own version in the same year known simply as Naked Lunch.

So which is it? Burroughs would later claim that the Parisian publisher added the article in question. He would also credit Kerouac with the idea for the title, and elaborated on its significance. "The title means exactly what the words say: naked lunch, a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork."

Dartmouth's acquisition highlights other important differences in the two editions. First, they represent slightly different manuscripts. Burroughs wrote most of the material that would become Naked Lunch in Tangiers. When Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac visited him there, both men helped Burroughs to edit the manuscripts that became Naked Lunch. The two published versions represent Ginsberg and Kerouac’s interventions.

In the case of the American version, Naked Lunch became a cause célèbre after it was banned in Boston on grounds of obscenity. That ruling was later overturned by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, and the case would help to settle obscenity laws related to literary works. The case would also elevate Burroughs’s celebrity to a status enjoyed by his Beat buddy Kerouac and Norman Mailer, an important defender of Naked Lunch in the Massachusetts court case.

Both copies were purchased on the Doris Benz Fund.
Posted by Jay Satterfield for Mark Melchior