Notes on a humanizing craft, a National Book Award, the Adamses, Avant-garde dancers, Irving Howe's tribute, and the Texas nation.

A traveling exhibition celebrating a quarter-century of fine printing and bookmaking by the Stinehour Press of Lunenburg, Vermont, founded and operated by Roderick Stinehour '50, was mounted by the College Library early this year. Entitled Twenty-fiveBooks - Twenty-five Years, the exhibition is visiting other major university libraries throughout the United States during 1976.

The exhibition comprises 25 selected volumes as well as a display of other work done by the press since its founding in 1950 by Stinehour, then fresh from an intensive apprenticeship in Ray Nash's Graphic Arts Workshop. A catalog of the exhibition has been prepared, and special issuances of it will be made during the year for the Wynkyn de Worde Society of London, the Typophiles of New York City, and the Friends of the Dartmouth Library.

In the preface Stinehour states the aim of his press with characteristic Vermont reticence: "to print books better than is ordinarily done." Bibliophiles throughout the English-speaking world will recognize the understatement, for the distinguishing mark of a Stinehour Press book is not merely that it is "better," but that it is the best. As the books in the exhibition demonstrate, this press has become a universally acknowledged leader among the very few small presses surviving in this country.

The Problem of Slavery in the Age ofRevolution: 1770-1823 continues to gather laurels for David Brion Davis '50. Hard on the heels of the 1975 Albert J. Beveridge Award, pesented by the American Historical Association for the best book of the year on the history of the United States, Latin America, or Canada from 1492 to the present, comes the National Book Award for history.

Those who followed the widely acclaimedAdams Chronicles on their public television channel may have spotted a few familiar faces among the actors. Others who served the series, though in less visible contexts, will be equally familiar, for this masterful portrayal of a family of Harvard notabilities had a decided Dartmouth flavor to it. The casting consultant for the series was Julius R. Wolf '51; the coordinating producer was Robert E. Costello '43; and among the actors, writers, and directors were Alan Hewitt '34, David Birney '61, Allison S. Hall '42, and John S. Edwards '58. Particularly memorable was Birney's mid-series portrayal of the character of John Quincy Adams. which included just the right touch of aristocratic hauteur and Massachusetts reserve. If Birney's reading is not the way John Quincy Adams actually was, then it is certainly the way he ought to have been.

Perhaps the most talked-about young, avant-garde dance troupe in New York City this winter has been the Pilobolus Dance Theater. One half of the four-man-two-woman troupe are recent Dartmouth graduates: Rob Pendleton '71, Jonathan Wolken '71, and Michael Tracy '73. One of the women, Allison Chase, was their instructor here.

Founded by Pendleton and Wolken in 1971, Pilobolus has recently earned warm praise from quarters not in the habit of distributing critical accolades lightly. Both Clive Barnes in the NewYork Times (March 14) and Arlene Croce in the New Yorker (April 5), agree that the troupe has brought welcome new vitality to an often over-stylized art form. Their uniqueness lies in their backgrounds: "They are not really trained dancers," as Barnes remarks; "rather, they have brought to the dance a background in sports and gymnastics." Indeed, Pendleton was a member of the ski team and Wolken a fencer. Thus the dancing of Pilobolus is intensely physical, the reviewers point out, "a blend of naturalistic movement, mime, dance and downright gimmickry." And the blend is not only novel and exhilarating but aesthetically satisfying as well. "It looked super," Barnes concludes.

Near the top of all the best-seller lists for the past three months has been Irving Howe's evocative historical tour de force, World of Our Fathers (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). Howe's major English-language researcher for the book was Kenneth H. Libo '59. An author's debt to his researchers for what is often, as in this case, years of labor is usually considerable. Occasionally it is also the next thing to anonymous. It is not unknown among scholarly circles for an author to make a perfunctory, two-sentence bow to his researcher and then proceed to higher matters. Not so Irving Howe. His tribute to Libo's assistance - the opening paragraph in his "Acknowledgments" - is as warm and as full as befits Libo's sizeable contributions: "Throughout the years during which this book was written, I have been privileged to have as my main English-language researcher Kenneth Libo, ... I have never, in many years of literary work, encountered anyone with so remarkable a capacity for precise and imaginative probing into historical materials. Kenneth Libo has given himself to this project with great generosity; he has not only done prodigies of research, but he has been a sharp and persistent critic of early drafts. He also provided a preliminary revision of a major portion of Chapter Five. I am grateful to him as researcher, colleague, and friend."

The nation-wide significance which the presidential primaries in Texas suddenly assumed last month - to say nothing of the unique, attention-commanding qualities of the state itself - underlines again the importance of such studies of Texan culture as that of Mark E. Nackman '51, A Nation Within A Nation (Kennikat). Though the book is essentially a scholarly study by a professional historian, and though Nackman's subject is the rise of Texas nationalism up to the mid-19th-century, readers will find much in it which helps explain 20th-century Texas and Texans.

"Texas is a state of mind," John Steinbeck wrote; "above all, Texas is a nation in every sense of the word." And it is precisely in the struggles of Texans toward nationhood in the 1820s and '30s that Nackman finds the genesis of an identifiable Anglo-Texan culture and an esprit de corps which are not only unique but which, though mutated, survive to this day. At its worst, Nackman concedes, Texas pride becomes chauvinism; thus the often scornful, sometimes hostile, cliche view of the too tall - or too rich, or too devious, or too Right Wing - Texan. But at its best it is manifest in "a love of place, a fierce loyalty to the state, and a desire to advance its power and prestige." Either way, "every American recognizes it. There is nothing comparable to it in any of the other states."

Kingsley A. Jarvis '50, has published the first supplement to his legal book, PennsylvaniaCrimes Code and Criminal Law: Lawand Commentary: Plea Bargaining Table. The Supplement includes recent pertinent law.