Tutt Library News

A story from Tutt Library's past

Here's a story from Curator of Special Collections Jessy Randall. It first appeared here.

It's not often that library work involves crime of any kind, but this week we had a research question with a crime-related answer. I've changed the name of the perpetrator to protect his privacy.

First, the back story: from approximately 1903-1977, Colorado College had a small museum in Palmer Hall (now our social sciences building). Its collections included fossils, pottery, stuffed animals, and more. When the museum closed, the materials were dispersed to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and elsewhere. (The blue whale skeleton from the CC Museum, pictured below ca. 1920, now hangs in the Denver Museum.)

Recently, a Denver Museum staff member contacted me with some questions about a name she'd found associated with a box of items from the CC Museum. There were a number of named collections in the CC Museum, including the Lang-Bixby Collection, the Corwin Collection, and others. But this name -- let's say it was Dondrustim -- was one I hadn't heard before.

We checked through our files on the history of the museum and discovered that Dondrustim was indeed associated with certain materials from the CC Museum. Why? Because he stole them, creating the short-lived "Dondrustim Collection." 

James M. Dontrustim majored in art history and graduated from Colorado College in 1970. He was an honors student and won a prestigious fellowship as a senior. He worked with rare books and manuscripts at the CC library and also as a part-time guard at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, the local art museum.

In 1972, he was charged with stealing more than $10,000 worth of art objects from the Fine Arts Center and the CC library. Most of the Fine Arts Center items were there on long-term loan from CC. Dondrustim pleaded guilty, saying he had no intention of selling the objects: according to an article in the Colorado Springs Sun on May 16, 1972, he intended to study the objects, catalog them, and use them "to beautify his apartment."

It took us a while to figure out this mystery, because our file on the CC Museum is thick and the top sheet of stapled pages on Dondrustim misspelled his name slightly as -- let's say -- Dontressim. But our excellent student assistant spotted the similarity and found a list of about 100 items Dondrustim stole. Some were small, easy to hide under a sweater: a Babylonian clay tablet, a carved stone scarab. Others would have been more difficult to smuggle out of the museum: a prehistoric Anasazi ladle, a pair of Plains Indians leggings, a double-headed steel spear.

How did he do it? How did he get caught? Did he feel bad about it later? These are mysteries we'll never solve. But we can tell our Denver Museum researcher not to call Dondrustim a "donor." The items in the Dondrustim Collection may have been in James M. Dondrustim's possession for a brief while, but he didn't donate them; rather, the police recovered them from Dondrustim's apartment after his arrest and returned them to the museum.

little everyday mysteries of library work

Our own Jessy Randall has a post at a mysteries blog about an everyday library mystery, copied here:

I fear this will be the most boring post ever, but since I am interested in the everyday lives of authors, editors, and agents, I thought maybe I should talk about my own everyday life as a librarian.

My days are often like this:

At the Desk

I spent the entire day in official details;
And it almost pulled me down like the others:
I felt that tiny insane voluptuousness,
Getting this done, finally finishing that.

-- Theodor Storm. Translated from the German by Robert Bly.

This week I had a particularly insane voluptuous triumph figuring out a small mystery. A researcher called hoping to confirm that an African-American lawyer, George Gallious Ross, born 1879, had attended Colorado College, where I work. She'd contacted us because of a reference in Who's Who of the Colored Race: A General Biographical Dictionary of Men and Women of African Descent (c. 1915):

Unfortunately, CC had no yearbook in 1899 (the first yearbook was published in 1900), so this wasn't going to be easy.

I tried all the usual things I try with a question like this. I really wanted to find him, because if he'd attended CC we could brag that he was our earliest known African-American student. (We know there were African-Americans at CC as early as 1904, but 1899 would beat that.) I looked for him in early yearbooks and alumni directories. I tried searching the early CC student paper, the newly-digitized Collegian.I called the registrar's office to see if they could find him in early student records.

No luck.

At this point I looked more carefully at the reference in Who's Who, and also at the education statements in other entries in the book:

And soon I cracked the code. It all comes down to punctuation. Can you figure it out?

(I'll pause while you work on it.)

Semi-colons separate high school, college, and further degrees. There's a comma, not a semi-colon, in Ross's entry between "grad. high school, Las Vegas, New Mex., 1896" and "and at Colorado Springs, Col., 1899." The "Col." in Ross's entry doesn't stand for college. It stands for Colorado. (Notice the "O." in other entries meaning Ohio.)

Ross didn't attend Colorado College. He attended high school in two places: Las Vegas and Colorado Springs. A call to the president of the alumni association of the Colorado Springs High School (now known as Palmer High) confirms that George G. Ross graduated in 1899. They have a handwritten ledger listing the earliest graduates, and he's in it! Here's a picture of the school then and now, courtesy of the Colorado Springs Gazette.

 

 

Special Collections closing June 4-8 for minor renovation

Special Collections will be closed, or offering very limited services, from June 4-8. We are getting a brand new ceiling in our reading room, including new light fixtures, and the work will take about five days. During that time our reading room and some of our materials will be inaccessible. For more information, contact Jessy Randall, Curator of Special Collections, jrandall@coloradocollege.edu, 719-389-6668.

New exhibits @ Tutt Library

Come check out three new exhibits at Tutt:

The Courage to Remember:
The Holocaust, 1933-1945

 

A vivid and compelling series of text and images describing the Holocaust from its roots to its aftermath.

Apr.9-16, 2nd floor Atrium. Poster series created by the Simon Wisenthal Center; exhibit coordinated by Kobi Chumash. See Museum of Tolerance: Online Multimedia Learning Center: Index to Courage to Remember for online version.

Photo: Youth Aliyah in Marseilles port on the way to Palestine, 1934. CL:Leni Sonnenfeld

Colorado College During World War II

This exhibit covers the CC Victory Garden, women student activities during the time when few men were enrolled, the Quonset huts known as “Tiger Town”, and the V-12 military training unit that was housed at CC. All photos are from Tutt Library's Special Collections.

Block 7, 2nd floor display cases. Coordinated by Lisa Lister.

 

Science Books for Non-science Readers

Science books of general interest for people who like to read!  A selection of classic and popular science writing on everything from astronomy to forensics.

Block 7, 1st floor book display. Coordinated by McKinley Sielaff.

 

 

Exhibition of WWI letters and photos in Tutt Library

World War I-era letters, photographs, documents and dog tags from the Estival Collection are on display on the second floor of Tutt Library. The collection, from Tutt Library's Special Collections, spans the years 1882 to 1943, and contains principally the correspondence of Georges Emile Estival (1895-1918), a French soldier during WWI.

The letters are to Georges’ parents and sisters, and recount his time as a mechanic and ambulance/tank driver during WWI, 1914-1918. The collection includes photographs taken by Georges Estival and others during the war, and documents, such as the official death-notice for Georges Estival (a detail of which is seen here) who was killed in action. Also on display are materials from the Estival family from the period after Georges' death, through World War II.

The collection was donated in 2006 to Colorado College by Djamila-Stéphanie Robinet, resident of Paris, and delivered to Special Collections by CC History Professor Bryant Ragan.

To view the full Estival Collection, and originals of the materials selected and copied for the exhibition, please visit Special Collections and ask for Manuscript collection 0373.

A visit from the Colorado School for the Deaf and Blind

On November 12, eight students and two teachers from the Colorado School for the Deaf and Blind visited Colorado College Special Collections. They worked with 4,000-year-old Sumerian clay tablets and with a Hebrew text on vellum (animal skin). Some of the students used magnifiers; others used just their sense of touch. The students, who were in sixth, seventh, and eighth grade, had recently made their own clay tablets; they were surprised at the small size of the ones at CC.

See more photos of this visit.

Gazette article on Tutt Special Collections

The Colorado Springs Gazette has published a nice article about Tutt Library Special Collections. Entitled 'Fluffy surprise' joins CC special collections, the article takes a look at some of the odd, unusual or otherwise interesting new additions to the library's collections. It also mentions some of the new materials at the Pikes Peak Library District Special Collections.

"Fluffy surprise," it turns out, is a dessert served at CC in the nineteen-teens or -twenties. Don't let Sodexho get their hands on the recipe.

New exhibition of student-printed books

Visit the second floor of Tutt Library to see books from Cover to Cover, a class taught by Eric Saline and Colin Frazer at the Press at Colorado College, Block 1, 2007.

Each student in the class designed and hand-set type for a book in a limited edition (usually about fifteen copies). The student exchanged books with each other and donated a complete set to Special Collections. They're really amazing—they used handmade paper, and really thought "outside the book," you might say.

Librarian/Poet Jessy Randall reads Thursday night

Tutt Library's own Jessy Randall will be reading from her book of poems A Day in Boyland this Thursday night, November 8.

The reading starts at 7:00 in McHugh Commons (above Herb 'n' Farm on the west side of the CC campus).

You can read the book's title poem online, as it appeared in the Blue Moon Review.

Artists' books at Colorado College

Artists' books at Colorado College

In association with the the current Book as Object show at Coburn Gallery, Special Collections has a few examples of artists' books on display in the second floor atrium of Tutt Library. Artists represented include Mary Chenoweth, Jill Timm, Laura Russell, Natalie d'Arbeloff, and the Cuban press Ediciones Vigia. The mini-exhibition will be up from November to December 2006.