He Values the Rare In Books and Life

HARMLESS drudges," Dr. Johnson called lexicographers, though he himself wrote a dictionary. Some librarians seem like lexicographers. At least some of our brisker alumni think so. A librarian associates on close terms with books so old that they must be of little absolute value. He retires to mysterious recesses behind shelves containing a million books. Even a.subscriber to a book-of-the- week club loses some of his literary aplomb when after a tiring walk down some six-mile labyrinth, of volumes, many of them not even in English, he finds a librarian. What can a mere amateur of best sellers (some of which must be turned over to Mrs. Amateur because of the pressure of business) say to a librarian?

Well, almost anything. At least he could to Harold Goddard Rugg '06, Assistant Librarian of Baker. Yes, and they would soon be conversing in extremely practical terms. No alumnus can fairly call a harmless drudge a man with such diverse interests, and the adjective gets forgotten in the preposterousness of the noun.

cubicle, however, to dream of books or even to read and catalogue them, to the exclusion of other activities. It is true that he is the rare book expert in Baker to whom authorities turn, and that his many friends among the alumni think of him in terms of his important Dartmouth duties. But he is also a globe-trotter who has been almost everywhere and seen almost everything. Harold Rugg is senior to all men now on active service with the College; as student assistant in the Library, he was put on the payroll in 1905; and he has been on it ever since. He has not retired to a

You are a young alumnus and want to talk about ice skating? Harold Rugg has skated farther up the Connecticut River than most men your age.

You like dancing? He does too. If at 68, within two years of retirement, he does not go in for boogie-woogie, he recalls with a gleam in his eye the happiness of dancing old-fashioned waltzes to his favorite tune. The Beautiful Blue Danube.

You are an older graduate and like gardening? Mr. Rugg knows more about flowers in general and ferns in particular than any man in Hanover, where there are many who pride themselves on their botanical lore. He has collected ferns from all over the world, grown them in his own garden, studied the soils from which they came, gathered the seeds and given them away, pressed the leaves, and gained a minor reputation among fern lovers the world over because he discovered a new one which an authority named after him and described in elegant Latin.

Harold Rugg is good on cactuses also. Perhaps he unsanded some of his cactuses in Mexico? He has been there? Oh, many times. And he has gone botanizing many times in the Gaspe, which he knows more about than most of the Canadian French who live there.

Then he has been abroad, Europe and places like that? Indeed he has. He has dined in Soho, breakfasted in Paris, drunk in the glories of glass at Chartres and the antiquity of Visigoth walls in Carcassonne, savored the sunsets on the Cote d'Azur, tasted the Heuriger in Vienna, and sipped Turkish coffee in Constantinople. He has crossed and recrossed the countries of Europe from east to west and from north to south. He is as much at home in the harbors of Sweden as he is in the cities bordering the Mediterranean.

But many men have browsed about hither and yon in Europe. You would like something different? More color? The exotic? This Assistant Librarian may surprise you. In Palestine he has glanced back at Vespasian and the Crusaders, at Mohammedans and the Egyptians, Napoleon and the British; and he has anticipated the nostalgia of modern Jewry. In Cairo he has flattened" out scrolls of papyri, and the Dartmouth library has benefited from the unrolling.

There is some strange hunger in Mr. Rugg's soul. He has climbed the Teton Range in Northwest Wyoming, and he has climbed the Pyrenees running along their 270-mile range between Spain and France. With a pack on his back he has sought out Andorra, that fascinating republican state between Arige and which contains only six villages and only 5,231 persons, who speak Catalan, a little known Romance language. They all live in mountainous country from 300 to 3,000 feet higher than Mt. Washington, which is the best that New Hampshire can do.

Many persons might look on an excursion to Andorra as quite enough to talk about for the rest of their lives. Some are willing even to accept a trip to Bermuda, a honeymoon trip even, as a rich topic conveniently given them by beneficent Providence for others' educational amusement during the next half century.

But not the Assistant Librarian. He is just getting started. On another occasion he travelled to Spitzbergen, that archipelago 360 miles north of Norway, and with a few other romantic spirits engaged passage on a motor yacht named the StellaPolaris and sailed just as far north as he could until the ice became so packed in the Arctic Ocean that the Captain refused to go any farther. It was not the Captain's idea of a good time to get frozen in for all winter, even with an entertaining conversationalist, though the Dartmouth sea-sailing and globe-trotting librarian was willing.

"I have an insatiable desire for remote and lonely and queer places," he explains, and he is a product of the North Country.

Such flexibility suggests that librarians are freer of work than they actually are. Mr. Rugg has really been conventional in his travelling despite his longing for the primitive and bizarre. For one thing, different from professors, he has had only one sabbatical in 45 years at Dartmouth. That was devoted to his first European tour in 1927, which strangely resembled most firsts of American tourists. On his next trip abroad, three years later, Harold Rugg chose the Norwegian fiords, Sweden, and Danzig and then went on down through Central Europe to Warsaw, Prague and Budapest. The high spot on this tour was perhaps a luncheon in England with Lord Dartmouth on his attractive estate. The American democrat and the British nobleman reminisced about the cornerstone of Dartmouth Hall in Hanover which His Lordship had laid in 1904, the dinner given him in Commons by Dartmouth students, and the Eleazar Wheelock manuscript which he had given to the College when Harold was an undergraduate.

Three years later the Assistant Librarian was back in Europe. He was getting older, 50 to be exact, an age when most Americans begin to think of more comfort expressed in better hotels and modern plumbing. But not this man. He chose Norway. His trunk was a knapsack; his highway, a trail; his lodging, Norwegian huts; his destination, the mountains of Scandinavia; his companion, Professor Fred Lord.

You can guess the rest: the Petrified Forest, at Adamana; the Pueblo of Acoma, at Laguna; Newfoundland and Labrador, where he met Sir Wilfrid Grenfell, physician and missionary to fisherfolk, and had tea with him; the West Indies, Trinidad, and the Canal Zone; beautiful Caracas, in Venezuela; Jasper Park on the Athabaska River, in Alberta; and Mt. Robson, in British Columbia, highest of Canadian Rockies.

THOUGH Harold Rugg likes the picturesque enough to take unconventional steps, he is by no means a recluse, and he has the reputation of being a cheerful and adaptable companion. From 1908 to 1940 he did a lot of mountaineering with the Appalachian Mountain Club of which he is a life member. Other travel cronies have been two biologists on the Dartmouth faculty, William W. Ballard '28 and Norman K. Arnold, and a Harvard football coach, Dick Harlow, with whom he has botanized.

Mr. Rugg has travelled so much that one wonders how he has had time for so many other activities. Though a resident of New Hampshire, he has been actively engaged in activities ordinarily reserved for residents of Vermont. He joined the Vermont Botanical Club as far back as 1906 and has been to every meeting since with only five exceptions. Since 1947 he has been president.

"It's crazy having an out-of-state person as president," he remarks. "They always used to have professors at Middlebury. I suppose they thought I was all right because I was born in Hartland."

He is Adviser to the Sheldon Museum in Middlebury, Vermont, which includes on its Board of Directors prominent artists, historians, educators, and museum directors whom he enjoys meeting on intimate terms. He is President of the Hartland Historical Society.

His highest Vermont honor is a directorship in the Vermont Historical Society which came to him 20 years ago, and he attends meetings of the executive board four or five times a year.

It is no exaggeration to say that the Rugg collection of Vermontiana is the finest in the world. It contains about 2,300 books and 3,000 manuscripts, history, poetry, and fiction. The most valuable Mr. Rugg locks up in a cabinet in his Baker office, and others are scattered about his bachelor quarters above the Howe Library and on the tenth level of Baker.

He collects other books of course. An early friend of Robert Frost, he has hardly built up so fine a collection of Frostiana as that of the American millionaire, Mr. Bernheimer, who recently caused such a literary sensation by putting it up for auction in New York, but it is nonetheless "very good."

Long ago Mr. Rugg spent a day with Frost in Franconia when the poet had just returned from England where he was recognized, ironically enough, before he was in America. Even then the librarian believed in the poet's greatness and told him so and won his everlasting gratitude by arranging for him his first public lecture and reading in the Little Theatre in Hanover, for a fee of $50. At that time Robert Frost was desperately poor, and he has since told Lawrence Thompson of Princeton, his biographer, how grateful he was and has expressed his appreciation more than once in his own handwriting, inscribing his own books, letters, and manuscripts and presenting them to his friend Harold.

The Assistant Librarian collects other things as well. He has inherited antique furniture and added to it, but having no house of his own, he has to store it. More impressive than the furniture is the old American glass. Mr. Rugg began it when he was still in college, 1903 through 1906. He is most charmed by his Bennington ware of which he has some 200 pieces, most of it gathered before it was so sought after that the price went nearly out of sight.

"There is almost none now to be bought," the librarian-collector observes, not without New England satisfaction. "People today are unable to buy genuine Bennington and probably cannot even recognize it. So they buy junk."

A minor hobby has been bookplates, but he has given them up. "I don't know why," he says, "except that as one grows older, one's tastes in collecting change."

He used to concentrate on American engravers and has a couple of hundred bookplates by J. W. Spenceley, the second most important artist, and has given to Baker about 100 done by E. D. French, the most important.

Incidentally Mr. Rugg has Baker down in his will for his collections, except the Vermont one. "If I should die today," he observes, "the Vermont Historical Society will get my Vermont treasures, though with taxes rising all the time and my retirement looming up, I may have to sell them." He smiles wryly, but his tone of voice lacks absolute seriousness.

THE collector seems to have plenty of time for a variety of college activities. For 41 years he has been secretary of the local chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, the longest time any secretary has held office in the history of that society. After 27 years, Prof. E. Bradlee Watson '02, then President of the local chapter, took the occasion of the 150 th anniversary of Phi Beta Kappa to give a testimonial speech in his honor at the annual banquet. For the relatively short time of 13 years the Phi Bete secretary was also Secretary of the Class of 1906.

He has been long held in repute as counsellor. For some years he was adviser to the Arts, a faculty and student literary society, and met with its board of governors every two weeks.

Zeta Psi values him as its Faculty Adviser and has for many years. In college he joined no fraternity, but he did belong to Gamma Alpha, a scientific society, no longer in existence. Brothers in Zeta Psi thought well enough of him to give him a testimonial dinner in 1948, and the president of Zeta Psi, Dudley K. Wright, awarded him a certificate of appreciation. More than 60 brothers were present, as well as members of the faculty and a fraternity representative from the New York national headquarters.

Since April 1914 the Assistant Librarian of Baker has been Literary Editor of the DARTMOUTH ALUMNI MAGAZINE, and as far back as 1929 he was called "The Graduate Manager of Literature" because of his wide acquaintance with Dartmouth writers and publishers.

For 20 years he gave a course in the Art of the Book, limited to juniors and seniors and elected each semester by about a dozen students. It dealt with the introduction of printing, the history of famous presses, book binding, bookplates and book illustrations, and the history of books in the United States, England, France, Italy, and Germany.

Athletically the Instructor in the Art of the Book has been more active than brilliant. In 1906 he skated with Dr. Arthur M. Cragin '06 to "Pompey," as Pompanoosuc was then called, and as late as 1931 he took lessons, but he says now, "I am not and never was a skater. My ankles are too weak." During his undergraduate days classmates with stouter ankles used to skate to Thetford and even to Woodsville against the wind and then come blowing back, their coats billowing out like sails.

He wanted to become a skier and earnestly sought instruction from Otto Schniebs, but he began too late for downhill running, which seems to be all that modern skiers care about. Too old to learn turns, he contented himself with crosscountry tours to Moose Mountain and back, 16 miles the round trip.

"I remember when I used to ski with Francis Childs," he says. "We had pieces of board shaped up by the college carpenter, who nailed on some leather straps into which we inserted our boot toes. We used to ski down that hill by the Green Lantern. Straight down. Then we slipped off the straps from our boots, tossed the skis on our shoulders, walked with them up the hill, and did it all over again. We had never heard of bindings with heel gear."

He liked snowshoes better. He made three D.O.C. trips to Mt. Washington on them and was one of the first to climb to the top on them, eight miles up and back. It used to be considered so dangerous that the first party slipped off surreptitiously to do it, but they did not make it. Tile second attempt was successful. Harold was in on the third.

Despite all these avocations, the fact remains that Harold Rugg is primarily a librarian whose chief interest lies in Baker's rarest and most beautiful books. The pur- chase of rare books and limited editions is a subtle and important matter, for they are expensive, prices fluctuate, and competition among libraries and private collectors is indirect and intangible. Should a librarian cable for a rare book in England or on the Continent? It might be 50 years before copy would become available and then at twice the price. Or five months and twice as cheap.

This was the sort of problem Mr. Rugg was facing when last interviewed in his office. Beside him and dog-eared was the 1950 Catalogue of Rare and Secondhand BooksOffered for Sale by Gilbert H. Fabes fromthe Ancient Town of Rye (One of the FiveCinque Ports) in the County of Sussex,England.

The Rare Book Expert was trying to decide whether he should buy a copy of T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom in a limited edition of 750 copies. 4to. Original quarter pigskin. Very fine copy enclosed in folding cloth box. 1935. Price 12 pounds. He preferred, however, another edition of the same book costing $ 1,000, but Baker does not have the money right now.

Another book in the same catalogue which was causing the eyes of the Rare Book Expert to glisten was Les Amours deDaphnis at Cloe, Ashendene Press, Traduction de Messire D. Amyot. Illustrated with wood engravings by Gwendolen Raberat. Initials in Colour by Graily Hewitt. Limited to 290 copies. Roy. Bvo. Original green boards, vellum back. Fine copy. 1933. 18 pounds.

Why glisten? Because Baker has six of the 40 volumes of the Ashendene Press, two of them among the most famous, Dantes, and here was a chance to add another volume.

Rare book catalogues provide endless evening reading for Mr. Rugg, for each one may contain as many as 1,000 items.

A specialist in rare books and limited editions may seem like an ivory-tower agent, but this Assistant Librarian lives in the world. He is cooperative. The Friends of the Library, for example, praise him for his interest in their volunteer organization and its program, which has brought to Baker some $200,000 worth of books and manuscripts though operating on a shoestring budget.

In fact, Mr. Rugg is a sort of literary consul who transacts all sorts of book business with all sorts of persons writing in from all over the United States and foreign countries. Cheerful and easy to work with, though he has to deal ocasionally with cranks and fanatics, the Assistant Librarian has never once lost his temper in the 30 years that his secretary, Mrs. Inez J. Kellam, has known him, which is probably another record.

IN a life so varied and worth while as the one Mr. Rugg has enjoyed for 68 years, one wonders what experience he looks back on with greatest happiness. Was it the Arctic Ocean filled with ice and Northern lights? No, not that. The high peak he conquered in the West because he was known as "a valley hound," i.e., got dizzy aloft? No, not that.

Some rare piece of old American glass lound in an attic? A first edition of a famous author with a flattering inscription concerning Mr. Rugg's erudition? A unique bookplate? The fern he discovered which was named for him? The pride Ver- mont and her learned societies take in him? The Treasure Room with its magnificent collections, the pride of the College and discerning alumni? No, none of these though all give him pleasure.

Unobtrusive over the years even to the point of obscurity, Harold Rugg learned suddenly to his delight on three different occasions that Dartmouth, which he has served to the best of his ability since his junior year in 1905, has publicly recognized his abilities.

Dartmouth appointed him Senior Assist ant Librarian after 13 years of work.

Before the time when librarians were honored with academic rank, Dartmouth gave him the rank of Full Professor after 41 years of work.

Those were thrills indeed, but the big- gest came when President Hopkins in June 1940 awarded him the honorary degree of Master of Arts in recognition of 34 years of devoted and intelligent work.

As late as April 1951 the glow lingers in the Assistant Librarian's heart, but he is hardly a man to boast of his triumphs. On the contrary,, so. far as a search for any limelight.is. concerned, he might be only a lexicographer as defined by Dr. Johnson. The only light which interests him at the moment is the sun.

In a recent letter to a friend, Harold Rugg writes with New England reticence: "Unfortunately, I have no interesting vital statistics to report. I am beginning to feel my age and getting ready to retire. I am looking forward to a winter in Arizona and Southern- California basking in the sun."

HAROLD G. RUGG '06, ASSISTANT LIBRARIAN OF THE COLLEGE

A KNOWING COLLECTOR of a variety of things, Harold Rugg is shown examining one of the prize pieces in his collection of rare Bennington ware.

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH