The Korean American novelist Chang-rae Lee’s newest novel, On Such a Full Seaappeared in January with a technological twist: Lee collaborated with the 3-D printing company MakerBot to create a first-of-its-kind, limited edition 3-D printed cover, formed from a corn-based bioplastic and made on a MakerBot Replicator 2 Desktop 3D Printer.
“What I like about this project is that it re-introduces the idea of the book as an art object. Content is what’s most important, but this [3D edition] is a book with a physical presence too.” Chang-rae Lee.
President Harry Truman once said “The only thing new in the world is the history you do not know.” Because the site around Twilight Hall and the Middlebury Municipal Building has recently been a topic of community conversation, we thought people might be interested in these photos from the Middlebury College Archives. For more information on the history of the site and adjacent buildings, see pages 11 and 12 of A Walking History of Middlebury.
Click on the photos to enlarge them and see more detail.
View of Middlebury from Old Chapel in 1867. Notice the building site of the Academy (now Twilight Hall) that replaced the previous wooden structure.Academy Building in 1893, seen from the east end of the park between College St. and Main St.Graded School in 1900 seen from College St. just east of Weybridge St.The Graded School in 1900 seen from the corner of Main St. and Cross St.
Middlebury College’s Library & Information Services (LIS) will participate in a federal grant rewarded to the Northeast Document Conservation Center to digitize wax cylinder recordings in the Flanders Ballad Collection, one of the nation’s great archival collections of New England folksong, folklore, and balladry.
Working in partnership with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the grant will use IRENE/3-D, a system that uses digital imaging to retrieve sound from historical recordings made on discs and wax cylinders that might otherwise be unplayable. IRENE/3-D was used at the Library of Congress in 2012 to extract sound from discs produced by Alexander Graham Bell whose contents hadn’t been heard since they were made about 125 years ago.
Wax cylinders, Middlebury’s Special Collections & College Archives
Middlebury College will make available over 200 wax cylinders and more than 1,000 records from the Helen Hartness Flanders Ballad Collection. This new technology will make it possible to capture sound even from broken and cracked cylinders and records, making it possible to play ballads not heard for over 80 years.
Recently, while digitizing some recordings from the Helen Hartness Flanders Ballad Collection, we discovered a recording of an unidentified man reading from Uncle Lisha’s Shop: Life in a Corner of Yankeeland, by Rowland E. Robinson. (Here’s our 1887 first edition copy, and here’s a copy at the Internet Archive.)
The recorded text starts on page 13, seven lines from the bottom of the page. Try reading along while listening to the antique recording below.
Reading from Uncle Lisha’s Shop, written by Rowland E. Robinson
The reader takes on the accent of two of Robinson’s classic characters, a “Yankee” and a “Cunuck,” or a French Canadian.
Robinson wrote most of his fiction in the 1890s. His books were read widely read through the 1930s and 1940s when Helen Flanders was collecting field recordings.
Unfortunately, we don’t know who the reader is or when the recording was made. A ballad preceding this reading was originally recorded between 1939 and 1950, but we can’t be certain the singer of that ballad is the same person reading this story, or that they were recorded at the same time.
We may eventually discover a more complete version of the reading. For now, we can turn our ears to a voice from history, reading from a much loved book.
(Update: We found it and have shared it on our Vimeo channel so you can see it too! Watch it here. )
The Middlebury College Archives is searching for a movie about the College filmed in 1948. It features scenes shot at the Snow Bowl in the winter and the main campus in the spring. We’ve placed a request with Paramount Picture, which originally produced it, and we’re waiting to hear back from them. But we also thought it was possible that somebody associated with the College might have a copy somewhere. If you know where a copy can be found, please let us know. SpecialCollections@middlebury.edu 802-443-3028.
