Briefly Noted
Stanley B. Weld '12 is author of The Historyof Immanual Church [Hartford, Conn.] 1824-1967. A recently retired physician, Dr. Weld for many years has been an active layman in the church and has achieved some prominence as a writer and editor. For 20 years he edited the ConnecticutState Medical Journal, and he has published material on Connecticut medical history during the Civil War, and written a history of the golf club on Chebeague Island, Maine. Illustrated and privately printed, the Immanual Church volume runs to 115 pages, including an index.
H. Winthrop Webber 'l4, a member of the International Business Tennis Sponsors Association, is the author of "Play Tennis for Lifelong Health, Friends and Fun," a proposal for business sponsorship of world-wide promotion of tennis. In addition to the benefits of physical and mental fitness and of social pleasure, Mr. Webber argues for a vast program of instruction and tournament competition for youth as one means of offsetting their discontent and rebellion.
Born 1913 in Beirut, Lebanon, where his father was a science teacher, Sanford C. Brown '35, Associate Professor of Physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has had the recent honor of having his biography of Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, translated into Italian and Polish. Born in Woburn, Mass., 1753, Thompson, the physicist and adventurer, a loyalist during the American Revolution, was knighted in 1784, served the Elector of Bavaria (1784-1795) who made him a count of the Holy Roman Empire in 1791, and in England introduced improvements in heating and cooking equipment. Instrumental in organizing the Royal Academy in England and the Bavarian Academy of Arts and Sciences in Munich, he developed a calorimeter and a photometer and devised improvements in lighting. He was also an adventurer who moved in the most brilliant circles of London, Paris, and Monaco.
Amazing But True! Stories Behind theStamps by Doug Storer '21 may stimulate you to open family boxes in your garret. Rummaging in his, one boy found an old stamp, not much good. With elation he sold it to a pal for $1.50; today it is worth S100,000. Bought at the post office for 24 cents, the stamp with an airplane flying upside down is now worth $20,000. A penny-initation stamp to a governor's ball fetches $47,500. But these are the rarities. The proper emphasis and fun lie in what the hobby does for a collector. They make him an historian and a cosmopolite. In the Storer book one finds pictures of the Panama Canal, the Citadel of Haiti called "The Eighth Wonder of the World," Horatio Kitchener on a camel, a South American gaucho on a pony, Sir Douglas Mawson (Australia's geologist explorer), Father Damien who championed lepers, Asiatic flowers, deadly African serpents, winter sports, famous paintings, tales from the Arabian Nights, ancient automobiles, and famous Americans. The publisher is H. E. Harris & Company, Boston; the price, 75 cents; the format, colored paperback. If one were not assured by Mr. Storer that he deals only in verifiable facts, many stories behind the stamps would be incredible.
Colonel Richard L. Hayes '20 is author of three travel-trailer books, each costing $3.95, published by the Trail-R-Club of America, Beverly Hills, Calif. Travel Trail-ers and the Clubs describes the fun and adventure of trailering, rallies and caravans, names and addresses of all known clubs from coast to coast and their policies. TraileringAmerican's Highways and Byways,Volume I, describes 60,000 miles of East-West and North-South highways in terms of mileage and elevations, alternate routes, and free camping grounds. Volume II describes another 65,000 miles of highways in 18 states east of the Appalachian Mountains, and offers 37 maps, illustrations, and an index. Colonel Hayes has also written seven smaller books dealing with particular regions, including one for New England.
A specialist in medieval and comparative literature and modern criticism, Stephen G. Nichols Jr. '58 in July joined the Department of Romance Languages, Dartmouth College, as full professor. With Richard B. Vowles of the University of Wisconsin he has edited Comparatists at Work, Studies inComparative Literature (1968). In the Preface Mr. Nichols points up how comparative literature is expanding at an astonishing rate, discredits a common fallacy that comparative literature is nothing but watered-down literature, and establishes the funda- mental aims of the discipline. They are (1) to make use of scholars with a thorough grounding in at least three languages and literatures, (2) to concern itself particularly with the role of literature in the development of great ideas motivating societies and individuals throughout history, (3) to deal with the interaction of literature and the other arts, and (4) to do so by literary criticism, literary theory, and literary history. The publisher is the Blaisdell Publishing Company, a division of Ginn and Company.
In 1967 Mr. Nichols edited Le Roman dela Rose by Guillaume de Lorris with an in- troduction by Mr. Nichols in French, which opens with a quotation in English, "Love by itself, or with a minimum of adventure, is the topic of some of the best of later romances, and finds its most elaborate treatment in the incomparable Roman de laRose.... Here the field of external vision is acutely narrowed; for the movements of knights, giants, and damsels in distress are substituted the movements of the soul itself, and one's attention is focused, not on a set of defeats and victories in field and bower, but on the minutest events in the progress of a single love affair rendered through allegory."
