THE COLLEGE
No voice is crying in this wilderness." "It is a small college, and there are those who hate it."
Without an adequate library a Dartmouth man in 1952 might well paraphrase and degrade two time-honored glorifications of the College.
The Second Isaiah, the Old Testament prophet who wrote near the end of the Babylonian Captivity of the Jews, about 540 B.C., was the first to utter the eloquent and pathetic challenge which sounds like defeat: "The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness."
No defeatist, Dartmouth did right to appropriate the words Vox Clamantis inDeserto as the motto for her seal because, though spokesmen and listeners were different, we were attempting in early years to incline the hearts of Redskins to a religious citadel; and the forests were large and the pagan hearts as virgin of religious principles as they were stubborn.
Some 1,358 years after Isaiah, Daniel Webster spoke in passionate championship of Dartmouth, little but beloved; yet if the facilities of so modern a time as 1818 were all that we had for book learning today, it would not be long before students were heading elsewhere. The Hanover Plain would soon see new forests of ignorance in which if wild red men were missing, we should certainly have wild red deer that just because of a kind of wise wariness about civilized behavior are hardly fit subjects for Phi Beta Kappa and elevated Christian ideals.
Small college still today, Dartmouth has nevertheless a library which from few Points of view can be considered small. Ist book collection, larger than those of several of the great state universities, has no close second among colleges.
Now not merely one voice is speaking from a wilderness civilized; a chorus of voices speaks to the younger generation— some goo on the Dartmouth faculty using Baker Library and a surprising number of visiting scholars from the United States, Canada, and foreign countries.
The Dartmouth College Library has been growing at a fantastic rate. When Baker was built in 1928, it had only 265,- 306 volumes, and the best minds believed that it had enough space for the foreseeable future, but as early as 1942 a new stack structure had to be built which raised the total shelving capacity to about 1,000,000 volumes.
The principle on which Baker was built and administered was that it should be a college library open to the students and easily accessible. With such mushrooming however, any interested person could perceive that Baker must make up its mind about future progress. Should it strain to confine and remain a college library primarily for undergraduates? Should it become ambitious and attempt to serve not only Dartmouth but America and perhaps even the world?
The talk heard today among informed persons has shifted emphasis. Natural growth or miracle, Baker is, whether one likes it or not, a university library of respectable standing. In size it cannot compare of course with Columbia's, which has almost two million volumes, Yale's with almost four, and Harvard's with more than five.
Certainly the Dartmouth College Library is not to be described any longer as merely adequate for an undergraduate body of 2,600 men. In fact, any graduate's praise is likely to be quieter than that of visiting scholars who in increasing numbers year after year make intellectual pilgrimages to Hanover and fall in love with the town, the elms, and the friendliness. They fall in love too with the library staff who have disarming eagerness to see that visitors shall have the full resources of Baker at their typewriter keys, but most of all they become enamored with Baker books and Baker facilities.
How many graduates know that Baker has about 100 studies, 45 of them faculty cubicles, delightful little retreats, some as high as ten floors up among the treetops with birds singing and Vermont and New Hampshire hills in view and with absolute seclusion behind two locked doors, one of them grilled? That visiting scholars begin applying early in the year for the use of one (it is free) during the summer months? That the demand is so great that Baker could easily use $15,000 to build another fifteen to accommodate the demand?
WHO are these persons who vie with one another for privileges in Baker? They are professors of all kinds from all over the country, private scholars, government researchers, freelance writers, and—well—specialists in half a hundred fields.
Just how good is the Dartmouth College Library? Mere statistics hardly tell the story. An account book is not canvas. How can one paint a picture with a budget? But even so let us flourish the dollar sign and see how green a picture it suggests. Last year Dartmouth spent $33,615 on books, $13,658 on periodicals, and $15,935 on bindings, a total of $63,208. Since 1946 Dartmouth has spent $345,630 on books, periodicals, and bindings. As of June 30, 1951, the total number of volumes in Dartmouth libraries was 679,785, but that number is already larger; the budget for 1951- 1952 is $80,400.
These expenditures—substantial in any man's language—have been made possible, indeed inevitable, by numerous special gifts made to the College over the years and so earmarked by the donors that the income may be used for no other purpose. The Sanborn Fund alone provides an annual income of about $50,000 for book expenses. For many years the College has not been required to appropriate a single penny from its free funds for book purchases.
Mere statistics leave one cold. What one really wants to know is what they signify, the vision they evoke, the ability to communicate to friends about what is going on in Hanover. Statistics, their significance, the understanding of books and personnel: Baker and the Dartmouth vision—these are the concerns of Richard W. Morin '24, Librarian.
What better place is there to begin than with the College itself? What can Baker offer a loyal alumnus about his Alma Mater? Baker has an extensive alumni collection consisting of books and pamphlets by the alumni and faculty and about them. It has association books; that is, books formerly owned by persons associated with Dartmouth. It has broadsides dating back to the earliest days of Wheelock. It has books and histories relating both to the College and the town; books printed in Hanover; genealogies of Hanover families (the Dr. Gilman D. Frost compilation of notes which took nine and a half years to type up); and clippings, programs, and circulars. The pageant of the past is there ready to unfold for historians, professional and amateur. There are unbelievable riches in Dartmouth manuscripts, photographs, portraits, and posters. No library can possibly compete with us about our own, men, the poet Richard Hovey, the scholar George Ticknor, the lawyer and statesman Daniel Webster.
You would expect that Dartmouth has rich New Hampshire collections, and it has, but visiting scholars may be looking for other things.
Suppose we shift to books and the arts. Baker has collections of books with fine bindings, bookplates, broadsides, incunabula (books printed before 1500), fine printing, and fine illustrations.
WHAT attracts foreign scholars and scholars interested in European culture? Baker has an outstanding collection of books relating to adult education, law, and religion in Germany (the Rosenstock-Huessy Collection). It is rich in French and English plays (the Barrett H. Clark Collection), in Spanish plays, and in moving-picture scripts (the Walter Wanger Collection given in honor of the late Irving Thalberg is the finest in the world, and many universities would give a great deal to have it). It is rich in books about Italian dialects, in books about longevity (the Raymond Pearl Collection), in books and magazines in many languages about skiing and mountaineering, in the literature of Utopias.
Musicians are surprised at what they can find: songs of the Baker and Hutchinson families, songs of the Civil War and World War I, New Hampshire music, miscellaneous music, and general music.
Visiting scholars are often amazed at the catholicity of interests, at the extensiveness of collections which one would not expect to find in Hanover. It might be taken for granted that Baker would have so good a collection on the history of Northern New England railroads that no books could be written about them without long study in it. It might not be surprising that Baker is outstanding in Modern German Fiction, in Central and South American Literature, and in books about Far Eastern civilizations.
But would one think that a liberal arts college would find such fine collections as it does of books and pamphlets about physiological optics; of books about occupations (like butchers and bakers and tinsmiths and cabinetmakers); of books about magic; of books about fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth century medical practice and anatomical plates; of pamphlets about crystallography; and of tracts about English religious controversies between 1628 and 1843?
Baker has every reason to feel proud about collections of books by and about: Robert Burns, Robert Frost, Honors de Balzac, Rupert Brooke, Kenneth Roberts, Erskine Caldwell, Charles Doughty and Genevieve Taggard.
The informal organization known as The Friends of the Library, of which Professor Herbert F. West '22 is the moving spirit, has enriched Baker with collections of many original paintings and many classic and modern authors: first editions, presentation copies, manuscripts, letters, and photographs.
Perc S. Brown, for example, in memory of his wife Marie Beach Brown and in honor of their two sons, Bruce L. Brown '41 and Gordon S. Brown '42, has given hundreds of first editions and rare presentation copies of English classics of which, among most recent gifts, the Wordsworth presentation copy of Yarrow Revisited is particularly choice.
Among valuable collections given by George Matthew Adams are Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane, Katherine Mansfield, Vachel Lindsay, Ambrose Bierce, Richard Jefferies, and Edward Thomas.
Professor West has given his own collections of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Henry Miller, Edward Garnett, R. B. Cunninghame Graham, J. J. Lankas, Henry Williamson, and others.
These gifts are indicative of many other collections as fascinating and noteworthy as their donors are generous.
One must not think that all books are concentrated in Baker. The Associated Schools of Dartmouth College, Tuck, Thayer, and the Medical School, have their own and adequate libraries. Lesser collections may be found also in the departments of the College: art books in Carpenter; English, American, and European authors, chiefly belles-lettres, in Sanborn English House; and books in the fields of the Social Sciences in the Ferguson Room, a wing in Baker.
Lovers of Dartmouth and lovers of learning got a thrill earlier this year with the formation of a Russian Studies Program consolidated and expanded into a Department of Russian Civilization under a Carnegie Foundation Grant which includes a substantial sum for the purchase of books about Russian civilization, economics, history, language, and literature for the College library. It has become almost a platitude now to say that Russia's misunderstanding of American civilization is almost as great as America's of Russian. Dartmouth takes a dim view of ostrich pedagogy. Her students in Russian Civilization are not going to depend on English trans lations of any handwriting on a wall. If it is in Russian, they will be able not only to spell it out but also read it and think of what it means, in their own English as well as in Stalin's and Tolstoy's Russian.
As an outdoor college closely associated with the North, Dartmouth has just received a literary thrill difficult to match since the front door of Baker swung open for use in 1929. Packing case after packing case has just been unloaded and unpacked of the Vilhjalmur Stefansson Collection, the best in the United States on the Polar, Arctic, and Permafrost areas. (Dr. Stefansson, aged 72, born in Canada of Icelandic parents, began exploring Iceland as far back as 1905 and has been exploring the Arctic and writing about it ever since.) His library, a labor of love and of distinction, consists of 25,000 volumes and 20,000 pamphlets and manuscripts. Dartmouth elation at this acquisition must be tempered, however, because this collection is here at present only on loan, and it is not hard to believe that many universities in this country and Canada, not to mention Europe, are bidding against Dartmouth for its ultimate home.
Not only does the Vilhjalmur Stefansson Collection properly belong to Dartmouth with her own imposing collections of Arctic materials, her adventurous and outdoor traditions in general and' her interest in particular in polar regions but also the Stefansson Collection ties in naturally with another Dartmouth collection relating to it, the Map Collection, about 40,000 maps and 500 atlases, the basis of which was founded by Nathaniel L. Goodrich, Librarian Emeritus. Marine atlases alone run to 29 pages of bibliography, and we are rich also in detailed topographical maps of the world, U. S. Geological Survey topographical maps, nautical and aeronautical charts of the world, early American and New England and New Hampshire maps, reproductions of rare and unique and manuscript maps, and atlases on the history of map making. The collection is growing at the rate of about 4,000 maps and 35 atlases a year.
The map collections have already been useful, and the Vilhjalmur Stefansson Collection will be, to such departments as Geography, Geology, Government, History, International Relations, Mathematics, Naval Science, Sociology, and Speech.
The College seems always to be facing north. Professors like Robert A. McKennan '25 of the Department of Sociology and Trevor Lloyd of the Department of Geography head for Alaska and Greenland to live with and write about Eskimos. Students like Jerry More '52 and Barry Bishop '53 of the Dartmouth Mountaineering Club collaborate with Dr. Henry Buchtel '28 and Dr. Bradford Washburn of the Boston Museum of Science and then climb McKinley which is 20,278 feet high, Oher students like Tony Morse '52, son the Dean of Freshmen, and his pals Benjamin Potter '52, John Tangerman '53, and Nick Dean '54, who like more salt in their travel diet, climb aboard a hundredfoot schooner, the Blue Dolphin, in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, and head north for Labrador.
With all this northern adventuresomeness flowing in the veins of undergraduates, some alumni fear that these young men may go coldfooting it off into uncharted and dangerous wastes in the realm of ideas.
Many faculty members and a few visitors have noted an odd paradox that though Dartmouth has a reputation outdoors for ruggedness, professors must so often fight indoors an enervated and hothouse languidness. Some professors even manifest despair. Every time they throw open a window to let in some fresh northern intellectual air, students rush over, close it, and exclaim, "Brr. I'm shivering."
The wife of a prominent university social scientist listened in recently on her husband's Great Issues lecture in Dartmouth Hall about the relation, past and present, of an individual to the state, and the state to business. Next day the seniors (and they had been in Great Issues for weeks) put questions to the lecturer about his ideas of the night before, and the wife listened.
When a member of the faculty was taking her and her husband to the train, Mrs. Visiting Professor remarked archly, "I have travelled with my husband throughout the East and Middle West to colleges and universities, and I have heard innumerable questions from students. They are always the same questions arising always from the same philosophy of life and business. What I want to know is, where do the sons of Democrats go to college?"
