Dartmouth College Yearbook Photograph Album, Class of 1870

[Hanover, New Hampshire], 1870. Hardcover. Very Good. Quarto. Measuring 11" x 14". Bound in quarter black morocco and pebbled cloth over boards, gilt spine with raised bands, front cover lettered in gilt, all edges gilt. Compiled by Henry W. Tewksbury, a member of the graduating class, with his name stamped in gilt on the front cover and his bookplate on the front pastedown. Contains 55 albumen prints neatly mounted on the rectos of 55 thick card leaves. Light wear at the edges of the boards, light toning, very good.

An attractive Dartmouth College senior "class book" album with photographs most likely made by George K. Warren, credited as the first photographer to specialize in graduating-class photography. Known for the "high quality and strength of his portraits" Warren made all of the photographs for Dartmouth's first yearbook album in 1858 and thereafter kept a virtual monopoly on Ivy League and elite college yearbook photography for more than twelve years. Every yearbook is unique, having been compiled and bound for a particular graduating student. According to one of Warren's contemporary price lists, class portraits were 20 cents each, views and groups were 30 cents each.

This album commissioned by Tewksbury contains 51 portraits of senior class members in alphabetical order (Abbott to Worcester, with each surname written in pencil at the bottom edge of the leaf); two campus views; one group portrait of 13 students, members of the Kappa Kappa Kappa fraternity; and one group portrait of the entire class of 1870. Laid in are five loose albumen portraits mounted on paper: Dartmouth Presidents Asa D. Smith and Samuel C. Bartlett; professors Edwin D. Sanborn and Henry E. Parker; and one unidentified student. There is also a later tintype portrait of a student laid in next to his albumen portrait; three loose pieces of printed ephemera: a printed1868 program: "Exercises at the Burial of Mathematics"; and two broadsheets relating to the 20th class anniversary. Tipped-in among the student portraits are 13 printed obituary notices dating through the 1890s.

Henry Tewksbury, a successful lawyer and popular lecturer, suspended his practice in 1883 in order to tour the country. Severely injured in the 1887 West Hartford (Vermont) railway bridge disaster, Tewksbury recovered and was able to attend the class of 1870 20th anniversary celebration in 1890. Other notable figures pictured in the album include the remarkable character Theodore Barber, a university professor and book collector (and mentor to Andrew Mellon); and senior class President Francis Brown, a distinguished philologist and theologian, and Trustee of Dartmouth. A handsomely bound volume containing many fine portraits by or attributed to Warren.