On this day in 1828, Andrew Jackson was elected president.

I thought it would be good to put up this little piece of ephemera–related to the Connecticut push to get Jackson elected.

“The Committee-men should take it upon themselves, personally, to see that every Jackson man is at the polls.”

As was the custom at the time, neither candidate personally campaigned, but their political followers organized many campaign events. Most interesting are the notes of the political stance of Connecticut figures on the back.

Members of the current Tripod staff were able to benefit from the wisdom of several alumni who worked on the paper in their time at Trinity, and came in today to look at the exhibition “Ten Decades of the Tripod.”

Ben Barber ’65 held forth to the students about the importance of editing, especially when the current editor revealed that many student contributors were offended by changes made to their copy.

“That’s journalism,” said Barber, a professional journalist for decades who currently writes for the Huffington Post, and who made it clear that every writer needs an editor. Barber left Trinity and “became a hippie,” as he says, roving through India and Thailand for ten years, writing poetry and selling stories to newspapers back in the US. He spoke at length with several students about writing and reporting.

Robert Cockburn ’90, who also serves on the Board of Fellows, talked animatedly with the students and other alumni (Pat Sclafani ’83, and Patty Hooper Kelley ’82) and told stories of their days with the paper. A bit later Marybeth (Callan) Serdechny ’83 and Que (Ho) Witik ’83 dropped in and reminisced about the classmates they saw in the stacks of Tripods from the 1980s.

Another alumnus, Dan Kelman ’76, who served on the Tripod as a freelance photographer in the early 1970s, pointed out many of his pics and reminisced about his friend Dave Levin ’75, who went on to shoot photos for Sports Illustrated.

It is a fitting day to announce the recent gift of a small but fascinating archive from Jon Reynolds ’59 (Hon. D.H.L. ’15), a decorated veteran and an honored son of Trinity College.

Mr. Reynolds is shown here in front of his fighter jet in the early 1960s, and in May when he received his Hon. D.H.L. from Trinity.

Commissioned via the USAF ROTC program after he graduated in 1959, Mr. Reynolds was a seasoned fighter pilot when he was deployed to Vietnam in 1963; he was shot down on November 28, 1965 while flying an F-105 fighter-bomber, was captured and survived as a POW for seven years. After his repatriation in 1973 he had a distinguished career in the military and later with the Raytheon Company.

The archive we have received can be broken down into three parts: official and non-official correspondence related to his capture and imprisonment (including a dozen or so letters he sent to his parents during his captivity), as well as news clippings and published materials; letters he received after repatriation as a result of the VIVA campaign (see below); and printed epehemera and a small amount of official materials related to his post as air and defense attache at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, China from 1984-1988.

One of the most interesting aspects of this archive are the hundreds of letters Reynolds received as a result of the VIVA campaign–from total strangers, even from elementary schoolchildren, expressing support and good wishes, and shared stories. Initially an acronym for Victory in Vietnam Association, VIVA was incorporated in 1967 by a conservative student group who preferred the lectern and the party caucus to the picket line. In 1969 the name was changed to Voices in Vital America, to reposition VIVA’s aims to support the war’s troops and prisoners. The bracelet was the goose that laid the golden egg. In 1972 VIVA took in $3.7 million, much of which was spent on a massive POW/MIA public awareness campaign that included newspaper ads and billboards, tens of millions of buttons, brochures, bumper stickers, and matchbooks, as well as newsletters sent to a mailing list of over 150,000 (there are examples of many of these ephemeral items in the collection).

The collection will soon be processed for research, and is a welcome addition to our archives!

Well, in actuality, what I just brought back from Oak Knoll Books in New Castle, DE is a fabulous facsimile of the first book printed with moveable type, ca. 1455, shown here with TWO ORIGINAL LEAVES from a Gutenberg Bible that we have had at Trinity since the Fall of 1950.

This complete facsimile of the Gutenberg Bible was printed in 1961 by Pageant Books (New York). The reproduction derives from the Insel Verlag edition, which was based on the copy in the Königslichen Bibliothek in Berlin and the copy in the Standischen Landesbibliothek in Fulda, considered to be the most beautifully illuminated of the extant copies. According to the Gutenberg Museum, there are now 49 documented partial or complete copies of the Gutenberg Bible.

Last week in preparing a presentation for prof. Barbara Benedict’s ENGL 364 class, one of the books I pulled was our copy of the first edition of Alexander Pope’s translation of the Iliad (London, 1715-20). Pasted onto one of the flyleaves was a bit of paper that made me (and prof. Benedict, when I showed it to her an hour later) gasp in disbelief and delight. Here we have what MUST be a rare survival–a subscription ticket in Pope’s own hand, signed, for receipt of partial payment by one of his subscribers (and Pope scholars will understand the significance of this particular subscriber as well).

It was a great discovery of physical evidence, and allowed us to talk even more fully than we could have (using only the published subscriber’s list) about the ways in which Pope marketed, sold, and distributed the book.

Prof. Dario Del Puppo brought his First-Year Seminar on “Food, Fitness & Self Discovery” into the Watkinson for rather non-intuitive reasons, given the title of his course, until you understand that he routinely teached Italian literature from the medieval and Renaissance periods, and then the reasons become clearer.

In any case, the students were immediately engaged and curious about the 11 items Dario chose to show them–from an edition of Dante’s Commedia  published in 1484, a 1523 edition (almost pocket-sized) of Vitruvius’s De Architectura, and the 1632 edition of Galileo’s Dialogo.

There were lots of questions, and we looked at watermarks, bookworm damage, woodcut and copperplate illustrations, initial letters, and marbled paper–and one student even discovered a fragment of a medieval manuscript as part of the binding waste . . . . these sessions are always exciting when the students are engaged!

It was my pleasure to give a talk last week to a local chapter of the DAR on the life of John James Audubon, and specifically our copy of Audubon’s Birds of America, and its donor, Dr. Gurdon Wadsworth Russell, Trinity Class of 1834.

In 1839, after finishing the production of the plates, Audubon’s engraver Robert Havell moved to America. Almost forty years later in 1878, shortly before his death, he held an exhibition and sale at his home in Tarrytown of paintings and books—including our copy of Audubon’s Birds of America. They were purchased at the sale by a New York book dealer/publisher, C. S. Francis & Co., who in 1856 had charge of the sale of all of Audubon’s works. The set was sold the same year to Dr. Gurdon Russell, Trinity Class of 1834. Mention of this sale was made four years later in the December 1882 issue of Ornithologist & Oologist; the article stated, “The Doctor (G. W. Russell, 490 Main Street, Hartford, CT) also owns the Robert Havell copy of Audubon’s Birds, Double Elephant Folio. The copy cost $1150 and the table and roller drawers in which to keep it $100 new. Some years ago we furnished to the Doctor a letter from Robert Havell to one of Audubon’s sons stating that every plate was carefully selected as he was colouring the work, making it one of the best, if not the best, copy known.”

22 years later, an article ran in the Hartford Courant on July 11, 1900:

Fine Gift to Trinity / Dr. Russell Presents his splendid copy of Audubon Birds

Dr. Gurdon W. Russell of this city yesterday gave to the library of Trinity College the most valuable single work ever received by it in the course of its history. The work is none other than that monument of American genius and enterprise, “The Birds of America: From Original Drawings, by John James Audubon.” Dr. Russell visited the College in person yesterday morning and formally presented the work to President Smith. The extreme rarity and costliness of Audubon’s “Birds” has long made it famous in the book-world, and its deserved reputation of being by far the most sumptuous single ornithological work ever published has rendered its name well known to the general public, though few ever see a really fine and complete copy.

From 1897 until 1909, when Dr. Russell died at the age of 93, he enjoyed the status of being the oldest living graduate of both Trinity College and the Yale Medical School—he entered Trinity College (then named Washington College) in 1830, six years after its founding. Russell was born on April 10, 1815 in Hartford, the same year that Audubon’s daughter Lucy was born in Louisville, KY (she died 2 years later). His father was a printer who was born in Litchfield in 1790 and came to Hartford in 1812; his paternal grandfather was John Russell, a soldier in the Revolution who served in Boston, Long Island, and White Plains. Dr. Russell’s mother was the daughter of Gurdon Wadsworth, a lineal descendant of William Wadsworth, one of the first settlers of Hartford who came with Thomas Hooker.

Needless to say, Dr. Russell was one of the patricians of Hartford, and the list of his accomplishments was long and illustrious—having worked for Aetna for some 60 years. At his death he gave the College the REST of his natural history collection, numbering over 275 items of British and North American flora and ornithology, and including some of the great rarities we have at Trinity, including Audubon’s famous Quadrupeds of North America (folio) and the first and third editions of Mark Catesby’s Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands, containing the figures of birds, beasts, fishes, serpents, insects, and plants, published in 1738–100 years before Audubon’s Birds of America, and a cornerstone of any collection of American natural history.

As I continue my survey of the College Archives I recently discovered two large three-ring binders containing typed notes for “A Survey of American Literature” taught by Kenneth Walter Cameron in the 1950-51 school year.  These notes were donated to the archives by Hollis S. Burke, Class of 1951.

This led me to discover History of English and American Literature, by Charles F. Johnson, Professor of English Literature at Trinity from 1900-1931.  This work was published in 1900 and is part of the Trinitiana Collection.  These archival treasures opened up some questions for me:

The Burke notebooks contain many transcribed passages from various literary analyses and critical works.  Did students in the early 1950’s spend time transcribing these works themselves?

[Posted by Peter Rawson, Associate Curator of Archives & MS Collections]

This morning we happily responded to a last-minute request to pull copies of the College yearbook (Ivy) dating from the 1950s and the 1980s for Jen Jack Gieseking’s American Studies 203 (“Conflicts & Cultures in American Society”) course. The students had recently seen the movie Back to the Future and were fascinated to look at what Trinity “looked like” in the 1950s vs. the 1980s, as professor Gieseking led them through the themes he wanted to cover–coeducation, racial equality, social norms and conflicts, etc.

All of the Ivy’s are available online through our digital repository.