Twelve Centuries of Manuscripts and Rare Books
at Dartmouth College

(A PDF version is available Collecting.pdf)

By Philip N. Cronenwett, former Special Collections Librarian
Image Credits: Joseph Mehling and Jeffrey Nintzel

Part Three

One of the most heralded of all Dartmouth alumni, Robert Frost, Class of 1896n - still listed as a NON - graduate, spent less that a term as an undergraduate at Dartmouth; leaving for Thanksgiving never to return as a student. As a young poet recently back from England

with two books of poetry published, Frost lived in northern New Hampshire and continued to write. As his fame grew, he returned often to Dartmouth

to lecture, here in the Treasure Room that served for decades as the special collections reading room. In 1961, blinded

by the sun, Frost attempted to read a poem at John F. Kennedy's inauguration. Because the poem had been recently written and not yet committed to memory, it was an impossible task and Frost returned to the familiar "The Gift Outright" that he could recite from memory rather than the longer poem he had written specifically for the president.

It was Frost himself who fostered the idea that his poems came to him fully formed as he walked in the woods or worked in the fields. While this is a charming addition to the Frost mythic canon, it is far from reality. He labored long and hard at his craft. The seminal ideas for some of the poems can be found in his early notebooks while these poems in final form are only to be found in later notebooks. One of my favorites

is "How Hard It Is to Keep From Being King When It's In You and In the Situation," more for the descriptive title - longer that a haiku of Matsuo Basho - than for the poetic content. The poem, here seen in draft form, is a dialog between a prince and his mentor. It changed draft for draft as Frost became more concerned with the comical yet dangerously undemocratic antics of Senator Joseph McCarthy. This notebook is one of 44 owned by Dartmouth and one of only 48 in existence. We can modestly state that, while most institutions claiming to have major Frost collections count their manuscript materials piece - by - piece, we count ours by the linear foot.

Often when we think of library treasures, early manuscripts are what come to mind. Dartmouth's early treasures are some of the oldest and some of the most beautiful to be found anywhere in the Americas and are the direct result of the generosity of a small group of donors. Chief among the donors of early manuscripts that show the development of palaeography - handwriting styles - and codicology - the development of the book format - is Mark Lansburgh, Class of 1949. Mark is an art historian, collector, and expert in palaeography and his gifts to the library over the years exemplify his interests.

One of the earliest manuscripts we hold is a Liber glossarum leaf, written in Aachen, most probably in the Carolingian court scriptorium, around the year 800, about 1200 years ago. This leaf is a single page of much larger manuscript glossary, the precursor of today's dictionary. It gives a word, its definition, and a use of the word in context. The recto and verso contain

the words from refugavit to reges, that is r - e - f to r - e - g on two pages so we can imagine how large the complete manuscript must have been. This manuscript also has a provenance - a history - that is very distinguished. In the bottom center of the recto is the distinctive Phillipps number, indicating the manuscript was once owned by the greatest accumulator of early manuscripts ever, Sir Thomas Phillipps.

A second Lansburgh gift

in the exhibition is a leaf from a Beneventan antiphonal written about the year 900. The area around Benevento, Italy, retained its peculiar liturgy, musical notation, and palaeography long after Roman custom and uniformity overtook much of the rest of Italy. The leaf exhibits the distinctive Beneventan style in its text and music

for Psalm 50, Misrere mei deus. Thought to be one of the earliest musical manuscripts in a repository in the Western Hemisphere, the text and music were sung on a national television news broadcast by Professor William Summer's medieval music class some years ago.

Back to page two or forward to page four.