A Spontaneous Expression

In 1923, a young girl sat down at her typewriter and began to write a story about flowers, meadows and woodlands. She was nine years old but had been typing since she was four. Home schooled by her mother, and with the support of her editor father, Barbara Newhall Follett finished the first draft of her book The House Without Windows three months later. She then began to revise it with the help of her father, Wilson Follett, and a print-ready draft was completed in October of that year, only to be destroyed in a fire a little while later. Distraught but not discouraged, Barbara began again, trying to remember the words that she had so carefully chosen the first time. However, according to her father:

One day in December, everything was suddenly different. As an experiment of despair, Barbara had stopped trying to remember the shape of sentences, the precise order and phraseology of details, and had begun to let the material come back as it listed.

And it did, but the new book would not be finished for one reason or another until 1926, when Barbara was twelve. It was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1927. As far as the difference between the first draft and final draft was concerned, Wilson Follett found that...

...as to ordinary literacy, there [was] no perceptible difference…[but] what the reader is here given is an articulate eight- and nine-year-old child's outpouring of her own dreams and longings in a fanciful tale, superficially revised by the hand of a twelve-year old girl.

The book was a success and a year later Barbara wrote The Voyage of the Norman D., an account of a sea journey to Nova Scotia she undertook with her mother. This second book was also critically acclaimed and Barbara was only fourteen when she was heralded as a child prodigy.

Her personal life, however, was marked by many disappointments. Wilson Follett abandoned his wife for a younger woman, leaving the family penniless, and forcing Barbara to work as a secretary in New York. While still in her teens, she married Nickerson Rogers, who graduated from Dartmouth College in 1931. Nick was an outdoor enthusiast like herself and by all accounts the marriage was a happy one until 1939, when Nick confirmed Barbara's suspicion that he had met someone else. On December 7, 1939, Barbara left her house after a fight with Nick. She had thirty dollars and a notebook in her pocket and was never seen or heard from again.

Ask for Rare Book PZ7.F735 Ho to read Barbara's first novel.

Write, Revise, Revolutionize

As we near the end of winter term and you find yourself spending more and more time in the library, you may catch yourself wondering- who wrote the first essay? Many scholars credit the earliest modern essay form to Michel de Montaigne, one of the most important and widely-read philosophers of the French Renaissance. In his time, Montaigne’s contemporaries often criticized him for mixing his philosophical arguments with personal anecdotes and honest observations, but today he is widely recognized for inventing a new form of written expression.

Rauner Library owns a rare copy of the definitive, complete collection of Essais published in 1595, shortly after Montaigne’s death. This edition matters because it contains more than 1400 edits that do not appear in earlier texts, a product of Montaigne’s more than two decades of writing, reflection, and revision. At age 38, Montaigne largely abandoned his political career in favor of “drawing his portrait with a pen.” After cloistering himself and 1000 books in a tower on his estate, he produced some of the most influential philosophical writings of the late Renaissance, weaving together candid introspection, academic arguments, bawdy humor, and enlightened skepticism--as well as an religious and cultural tolerance that was well before his time.  Montaigne’s work has directly emphasized writers as intellectually and stylistically diverse as Bacon, Shakespeare, and Emerson.

If you flip through Rauner’s copy of the text, you will find several pages full of handwritten notes. You may wonder who wrote them--especially since it was published posthumously. This handwriting actually belongs to Marie de Gournay, an accomplished writer and philosopher who became Montaigne’s friend and intellectual companion in 1588, when she was only 23 years old; he referred to her as his adopted daughter, and shared much of his work with her. After Montaigne’s death, his widow gave his manuscripts to de Gournay, tasking her with compiling and editing the definitive edition of Essais. She completed the project with the utmost care, adding her own preface and even correcting the printed sheets by hand before binding. de Gournay, like Montaigne, lived a life ahead of her time. She remained an unmarried female writer, and went on to publish some of the first feminist works in existence: her treatises Equality Between Men and Women (1622) and Complaints of the Ladies (1626).

You can read Montaigne’s Essais, translated into English, online. To see Rauner’s original edition, printed in French and Latin with handwritten edits by Marie de Gournay, request Rare Book PQ1641.A1 1595.

Posted for Emily C. Estelle '15

Have You Seen This Balloon?

On July 11, 1897, Salomon A. Andrée, Nils Strindberg and Knut Frænkel took off from Dane's Island in the Svalbard archipelago in an attempt to fly over the North Pole in a balloon. Things went badly from the beginning.

The balloon was overloaded and while it initially started to rise on release, it quickly began to sink as it traveled over the harbor, eventually touching the water. Andrée, Strindberg and Frænkel immediately dumped eight bags of ballast overboard to remedy this. Unfortunately, during the crisis, the drag lines that had been intended to be used as steering lines were lost, which put the balloon's path at the mercy of the wind. Moreover, the loss of ballast, both deliberate and from the loss of the weight of the steering lines, caused the balloon to rise too high, allowing the hydrogen lift gas to escape faster than anticipated. Eventually, the balloon came to rest on the arctic ice. The fate of the crew remained unknown for 33 years.

In 1930, a Norwegian scientific party discovered the remains of the expedition on White Island. The bodies of the crew were recovered as well as photographs and diaries which recorded their attempts to return to civilization. The flight lasted a little over two days. The attempted return journey on foot across the arctic ice ended three months later with the death of all three members of the expedition. Rauner holds material collected by William Hillman, a reporter, as part of his coverage of the 1930 discovery of the expedition's final camp. The collection includes prints of photographs taken by Frænkel, copies of the articles written by Hillman, and a flyer distributed in Greenland by the Danish government asking the native population to assist Andrée should he be discovered there.

Ask for Stefansson Mss-241 to read the stories accompanied by headlines such as "Heroic Struggle Bared in Notes Found on Bodies" and "Records Reveal Grim Fight For Life Amidst Ice."

Surviving the Cold

February has been brutal. The average daily temperature around here is running about 14 degrees below normal--and it is not like February has a comfortable "normal." This morning it was in the 20s below zero. So, as solace, let's turn to our polar collections. Cold is relative.

Amongst the many amazing manuscripts in our Stefansson Collection on Polar Exploration is Clements Markham's six-page hand written proposal to the Royal Navy to create The Antarctic Manual to serve expeditions bound for the last uncharted continent. Based on the Arctic Manual of 1874, it was to provide practical advice for conducting scientific experimentation in the South. The final product contains frank admissions of its limitations. The introduction to the "Climate" section by Robert Falcon Scott begins, "The meteorology of the Antarctic regions is practically unknown to science...." Scott would, of course, later become all too familiar with the area's climate in his tragic Terra Nova expedition (1910-1913) where he froze to death on his return from the South Pole.

As we shiver and complain of cars that won't start, ice dams on our roofs, and frozen pipes, it is somewhat comforting to read of winters "with a general temperature of -30 C. to -50 C."  Humm, it seems almost balmy outside now.

To see Markham's proposal, ask for Stef Mss-274. For the completed manual, ask for Stef G860.R8.

The Plantin Polyglot

Printer Christophe Plantin was a Protestant sympathizer during the height of the Reformation--but his greatest legacy is a Catholic masterpiece. In Catholic-ruled Antwerp, his sympathies drew the suspicions and threats of the authorities, so Plantin decided to undertake a massive printing project in order to publicly prove his loyalties, both to the Church and the Catholic king, Philip II of Spain. He proposed a comprehensive polyglot Bible that would present all of the canonical texts and the Catholic apocrypha in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and the Chaldean languages--Syriac and Aramaic. Philip II gave his enthusiastic support to the project, but not his financial backing; instead, he sent the renowned theological Benito Arias Montano to oversee the theological and linguistic correctness of the text.

The project, which lasted from 1568-1573, nearly bankrupted Plantin. He employed nearly 40 printers to complete it, and many of the original 1200 copies were lost in a shipwreck in 1572. However, it did win him the favor of Philip II, who granted Plantin the  exclusive right to print Roman Catholic liturgical books in his domain--along with the dubious honor of overseeing the skill and theological accuracy of other printers. Despite its complicated origin story, the Polyglot is Plantin’s masterpiece. Today, it remains incredibly important for its contributions to the study of language, theology, Biblical history, and the art of printing.

Rauner owns five volumes of the original eight-volume folio. The first four comprise the Old Testament, with the original Hebrew text and Latin translations on the left page, and a Greek translation with Latin commentary on the right. At the bottom of the left page is the Aramaic text, which is paraphrased in Latin on the opposite page. The fifth volume contains the complete New Testament, with a Syriac translation and Latin commentary on the left page, the original Greek text with a Latin translation on the right, and a translation of Syriac into Hebrew with paraphrased Latin at the bottom. This volume also includes a Latin-Syriac index of phrases.

If you want to check out this incredibly complex feat of printing--or use your high school Latin skills to learn some ancient languages--come to Rauner and ask for Rare Book BS1 1569, volumes 1-5.

Posted for Emily C. Estelle '15

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!