Lost Their Marbles!

Paper marbling is a beautiful and tricky art form that is often used to create endpapers for book binding. The marbled design is made by floating paint on the surface of water and running a comb or other tool run through it to create the specific pattern. Some marbling is even made by blowing through a straw to manipulate the paint! A sheet of paper or fabric is then laid across the top of the water to absorb the colors.

Coming in a wide range of colors and designs, marbled endpapers are a great surprise treasure to find in a book. And the addition of a marbled paper makes a book more unique; like tie-dying a shirt, no two endpapers will come out exactly the same, even if they are made using the same colors and pattern.

We have one book in our collection that includes several marbled papers, but not as part of its binding; this is a book about marbled papers, titled The world's worst marbled papers : being a collection of ten contemporary San Serriffean marbled papers showing the lowest level of technique, the worst combinations of colors, and the most inferior execution known since the dawn of the art of marbling. Containing only 10 marbled papers, the book also includes a lengthy introduction about the art of marbling, as well as the author’s alleged journey through San Serriffe in search of marbled beauty. The book is definitely intended to be satire – San Serriffe isn’t even a real place, after all. But it does provide a backward account of the elements of marbling that make it so popular; the combinations of colors and the intricate designs are not only aesthetically appealing, but also a marvel of artistic creation.

Actually, many of the endpapers in this book aren’t entirely unattractive, even if they are maybe a little less impressive than many of the more complex or skillfully executed works of marbling. Some, though, really are terrible color combinations and abysmal technique, resulting in some ugly endpapers. To see some marbling that actually captures the height of the art, check out our Instagram account @raunerlibrary on #marbledmondays! To see The world's worst marbled papers ask for Presses B532mow.

In Flew Enza

On September 22, 1918, young Clifford Orr wrote home to his mother about the first weeks of his Freshman year at Dartmouth. In his four-page letter, he complains of the lack of a writing desk, invites her for a visit to watch the "Fresh-Soph" rush (a fairly brutal hazing ritual), and talks about how his math class is going to be "fierce!" He even includes a hand-drawn map of campus. It is a lovely letter from a clever, chatty son to his mother.

Orr mentions that some students are worried they might be coming down with the Spanish Influenza. The epidemic that started one-hundred years ago this March killed between fifty and one-hundred million people worldwide and was particularly devastating for people in their early twenties, so this was a serious matter. Orr appeared undaunted, unless he was using humor to hide his fear, or perhaps just trying to keep his mother from worrying. Making light of it, he scribbled out a little verse for his dear mother's enjoyment:

I had a little bird and his name was Enza,
I opened the cage and Influenza.

Orr actually became sick with the Spanish flu later that year, but survived. He went on to have a successful career as a writer for the New Yorker. His letters home are a treat. You can see them all by asking for MS-532, Box 1.

"A Sailor's Life for Me"

In 1840, a fourteen-year-old boy from Kent County, England, went to sea on the whaler Sussex, which sailed from London on January 20, for the South Seas Fisheries under command of Capt. Hammer. Twenty-five years later the sailor sat down to write “his yarn” as a means of “guiding” his children through “many a shoal and quicksand.” In his account, he describes the voyage with all the trials and tribulations such a journey entailed. There were the islands of Trinidad and Galapagos and Honolulu, the description of hunting and catching a whale, encountering natives, and the storms the Sussex had to endure. He peppers his story with ink and watercolor sketches of some of these events. For example, there is the time that he was almost eaten by a shark.

We had been boiling out blubber which generally attracts them [the sharks] about the Ship. At 4 pm I left the helm and being rather dirty I thought I would jump overboard and the Cook (who on a previous occasion had saved my life) out of fun hauled my rope in so that I could not get back on board, when suddenly the cry from aloft was a Shark is coming! I swam for the rope immediately, and finding it hauled in I screamed with fear, as the shark was drawing very close to me. … The mate seeing the monster and knowing that I was overboard threw a rope which was very greasy so that I could not pull myself up, and they hauled in the rope still slipping through my fingers, when providently there was a knot in the rope which enabled me to hold on while they hauled me up, the shark following me out of the water.

To read more of his story ask for Codex 003385, “The Reminiscences of a Sailor's Life.”

Doin' the Raccoon

With the approach of 2018, we hope that you have plans to spend New Year's Eve in style, whether that be out on the town enjoying music, the company of friends, parties, or simply bundling up and and staying cozy at home with a good book and a nice drink. It can get cold up here in Hanover during the winters and, whenever the snow begins to come down outside Rauner's windows, we can't help but think of what it must have been like to weather a New England winter as a Dartmouth student back before efficient heating and double-paned windows were the norm. For Dartmouth students in the 1920s, part of a comprehensive strategy for staying warm was likely the purchase of a raccoon coat.

Raccoon coats were full-length fur coats that became a fashion craze on college campuses during the heyday of the Jazz Age, much like the ubiquitous Canada Goose parkas that so many Dartmouth denizens seem to sport nowadays. Like those parkas, raccoon coats were also quite an investment and could cost anywhere from $350 to $900 or more, depending upon the quality of the coat. To put that price in context, the cost of annual tuition at Dartmouth during the late 1920s was $400. Still, they were a must-have item for aspirational college men. The popularity of the fad, especially among elite institutions, is underscored by the lyrics of a 1928 song, Doin' the Raccoon: "Oh they wear them down at Princeton and they share them up at Yale; Oh they eat in them at Harvard and they sleep in them in jail."

Dartmouth students, although not fortunate enough to be name-dropped in a hit song of the era, nonetheless diligently bowed to the demands of fashion. The Dartmouth student newspaper was filled with advertisements for raccoon coats (as well as baby seal and bear fur coats!) and, during Winter Carnival, the train platform was often swarmed by fur clad Dartmouth men eagerly awaiting the arrival of their dates to the party. We won't speculate as to the other strategies that students employed to keep warm during the Roaring Twenties, but it's clear that wearing raccoon was a non-negotiable.

To explore the issues of the Dartmouth student newspaper from the 1920s, come to the reading room and pull them off the shelf. To see the full lyrics and music to Doin' the Raccoon, ask for Sheet Music SM 1567. To explore the various Winter Carnival photographs in the archives, search the Dartmouth College Photo Files database or ask to see them in person in the reading room.

Winter Scenes

We hope this gets you into the spirit of the season! brought to you by the inventor of the modern Christmas card, Louis Prang, his "Winter Scenes" series of chromolithograph cards from the 1860s. Color printing was a novelty at the time, and Prang had introduced the new technology to America. He issued dozens of sets of cards to satisfy public demand.

There are twelve cards in this series, all lovingly mounted by a 19th-century collector in an album containing over 450 Prang cards. There are series devoted to fall leaves, wildflowers, wood ferns and mosses, as well as aphorisms and exotic places from around the world.

To see it, ask for Iconography 1722.

Spotlighting Satan

If you were a book illustrator faced with creating the first illustrations for Milton's Paradise Lost, where would you focus? Let's face it, at least in the early parts of the poem, Satan is the most compelling character, and he's certainly the most fun to draw. It's no surprise, then, that he gets top billing in Jacob Tonson's lavish 1688 printing of Paradise Lost.


Not that we are feeling any cynicism about Christmas or anything, but it seemed like a good time to give him a moment in the sun...

Tonson's beautiful edition is waiting for you. Just ask for Rare PR3560 1688.

Rich in Stones

Last week, we brought you an 1890 plea to farmers to stay in New Hampshire. The lure of the rich soil of the Midwest was proving too strong, and land prices in New Hampshire were suffering. Skip forward fifty-odd years, and here we have a kind of admission of defeat in the first appearance of Robert Frost's poem, "Rich in Stones," in the 1942 Old Farmer's Almanac. Frost, an on-again, off-again New England farmer, knew what he was writing about. The short poem is narrated by an old New England farmer:

I farm a pasture where the boulders lie
As touching as a basket full of egg

It is addressed to one who has moved away to more fertile fields in the west:

In wind-soil to a depth of thirty feet.
And every acre good enough to eat

Then the narrator fantasizes about shipping a largish stone west to "set up like a statue in your yard." There it would stand as

"The portrait of the soul of my Gransir Ira.
It came from where he came from anyway."

There is a certain crustiness to the poem that captures the spirit of Yankee farmers too stubborn to head west, but also an acknowledgement  of the futility of staying behind.

This is part of our Robert Frost First Appearances collection that is incorporated into our Robert Frost Collection. You can ask for it by requesting MS-1178, Box 32, Folder 71.