Further Mention

What one Dartmouth professor accomplished in his spare time during a long teaching career is probably unique. The motivation of W. Benfield Pressey, Willard Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory Emeritus, may be only unusual, but, unlike some of his peers, he busied himself before and after classes, before and during vacations, before and after sunrise and sunset. As a teacher of Shakespeare he was concerned that his undergraduates did not sufficiently visualize Shakespeare as they read. Macbeth's dagger may take on bizarre forms in the imaginative eyesight of a contemporary American of Sicilian origin in New York or one of Swedish origin in farming Kansas: stiletto versus many-purpose Boy Scout jackknife.

Accordingly Professor Pressey ransacked libraries and books from many countries in many languages to locate and record illustrative representations in all of Shakespeare's dramas. His card file mounted higher and higher, and the final count lists 22,677 entries.

Dartmouth College and Baker Library have seen fit to reward such assiduity, meticulous scholarship, and pedagogic imagination by recording the Pressey entries on three reels of film (Xerox University Microfilms, Ann Arbor; $55 a set).

When does a catalogue get chosen as one of the "Fifty Books of the Year"? Answer: when it concentrates on Robert Frost and when it is compiled by Edward Connery Lathem '51, Dean of Libraries, Dartmouth College; designed by Joseph Blumenthal; printed by the Roderick Stinehour '50 at his Lunenburg, Vermont, press; and published under the imprint of David R. Godine '66 of Boston. The award, to "Robert Frost 100," was made by the American Institute of Graphic Arts in recognition of the typographical distinction of the catalogue for the Frost Centennial Exhibition. Based on cooperative loans from many persons and institutions, the Frost exhibit, organized at Dartmouth in 1974, was featured at seven libraries throughout the United States.

The North Virginia Sun, edited and published by Herman J. Obermayer '46, provides a supplementary medium to metropolitan newspapers and weeklies. In Editor's Viewpoint, a 63-page collection of essays, Obermayer comments on major and minor events of the past year.

Laurence I. Hewes Jr. '24 gives some startling figures about the poverty and miseries of rural people of Pakistan with a population growth of at least 2.7 per cent annually, and with the overpopulated rural labor force almost doubling by the year 2000. In a population of 65 million, 40 million men and almost all rural women are illiterate. Along with poverty and ignorance go malnutrition, unsanitary living, chronic diseases, and infant mortality. The youth of Pakistan face idleness, discontent, and frustration. What should be done to alleviate so grievous a situation is discussed in 143 pages of the Report on the International Seminar onIntegrated Rural Development, prepared by the Government of Pakistan and the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (published in Rome in 1975). The first 56 pages, a summary report, written by Hewes, are the product of his work in Pakistan, where he was consultant to the international agency.