A nice article about The History and Future of the Book today in the October issue of Rare Book Hub. Thank you, Susan Halas!

As College Archivist, I frequently get questions about whether or not there should be a “The” in front of “Colorado College.” I think the answer is no.

Colorado College is and was Colorado College, without a “The.” We began as Colorado College (no “The”) in 1874. College mailings from that period do not use “The.” The earliest college seal, used on the cover of the 1905 CC course catalog, has no “The.”

From the 1960s through about 2010, CC sometimes used a “The” in front of its name, but not consistently. In the CC course catalog, we find “The” in 1963-1964, but not before, and it’s in 2010-2011, but not after. Even within a particular catalog, use of “The” is not consistent. Many CC catalogs for this period have “Colorado College” on the cover and “The Colorado College” on the title page, and text throughout any particular catalog will sometimes have “The” and sometimes not.

From 1989-1998, CC’s official logo included the “The.” Before that, CC didn’t have an official logo; after that, our logos have no “The.”

For more information, see Colorado College Information File “Colorado College – Emblem, Seal, Motto, Insignia, Logo, Graphic Images, Mascot, Yells, Cheers, Chants, Colors, Letterhead, Stationery, Signage, Swag” in Special Collections. (As you can tell, you’ll find a lot of other fun stuff in that file, too.)

Most of the library renovation work happening in Tutt Library is noisy, messy, dusty, and not much fun for the people in the building. But here’s a brilliantly shining silver lining to the project: artist Sandy Kinnee has loaned two of enormous, gorgeous abstract paintings for the duration of the renovation.

Special Collections has had many incarnations over the years. The space shown here:

now looks like this (photographed with a wide-angle lens by the artist):

The paintings are numbers 2285 and 2290 from his Stepping Stones Perhaps series of March 2016 (images courtesy of the artist):

Each painting in the series is about 14 feet long and 8 feet high, with some variation.

Where are all the books, you ask? Where are the cabinets and shelves? The books and files have been moved to non-browsable areas of Special Collections, mostly the “cage” across from the curator’s office. The college donated the cabinets and shelves to Queen Palmer Elementary School, where the students have become quite fond of them already as stand-up desks. We hope the Woman’s Educational Society will be pleased that the furniture they donated in 1977 is having a second life in a new kind of educational setting.

Starting this summer, the Sandy Kinnee Room (so dubbed by curator Jessy Randall) will be open for general study whenever the library is open. Special Collections researchers will work in the curator’s office, which now seats eight. We will use the Kinnee Room when we have more than eight researchers at a time and whenever we perform class instructions (about once a week during the school year).

Addendum, July 18, 2016: the Pokemon Go craze has come to Colorado College, and the creatures are everywhere. A visitor snapped this photo of a Diglett in in front of Kinnee’s work:

The Floating Library in Minnesota has accepted a number of books made by CC students at The Press at Colorado College.  We are thrilled! Books include Post Book, Animal, The 2014 Senior Fiction Chapbook Series, Circular Logic, and Back Pages. Authors/printers/designers include, in no particular order, Andrea More, Sean Rapp, Atticus Moorman, Amos Adams, Kristy Murray, Eliza Ashley, Eliza Brilliant, Hannah W., Hershall Cook, Justine Comacho, Grace Hunter, Karl Oman, Steven Hayward, Andrew Pyper, Sam Tarlow, Gracie Ramsdell, Tucker Hamspon, Jay Combs, Ben Grund, Sami Kelso, Alec Grushkin, McKenzie Ross, Naomi Blech, Savannah Worth, Eddie Figueroa, Zack Smith, Elise Burchard, Anneka Shannon, Maria Torres, Ming Lee Newcomb, Isabel Leonard, Katie Barasch, Natasha Appleweis, Daniel Rood-Ojalvo, Mike Mayer, Patrick Lofgren, Nanette Phillips, Adara Lawson, Tara Coyle, Heather Ezell, Drew Zieff, Jesse Paul, Melissa Rush, Evan Ryan, Emily Kohut, Madelyn Santa, Mikala Sterling, Kyra Wolf, Josie Wong, and Aaron Cohick.

With plans afoot to renovate Tutt Library in the near future, we thought it might be fun to document the spaces Special Collections has inhabited over the years.

In Coburn Library, we had the Colorado Room, home to Professor Archer Butler Hulbert’s books and often the professor himself. Hulbert taught history at CC from 1920 until his death in 1933. He published many books on the American West and Southwest, including The Forty-Niners and the Overland to the Pacific series.

Coburn was built in 1892, renovated in 1940, and razed in 1964, so that was the end of the Colorado Room.

The architects’ plans for Tutt Library, built in 1962, contained a small Special Collections area adjacent to a Smoking Lounge [!]. The main room was used primarily for display. In 1977, the Woman’s Educational Society funded custom-built wooden shelves for the area, which was renamed the Colorado College Room.

In 1980, when the collections and services of the library outgrew the original Tutt building, the college built “Tuttlet,” an annex to the south. It contains a new Special Collections with the same W.E.S. shelves.

In recent decades, we’ve had some quiet days…

and some very busy days (additional shelves built by Dan Crossey).

We’re looking forward to seeing what happens next for Special Collections at Colorado College.

On Saturday, January 19, the Pikes Peak Pen Women visited Special Collections to learn about historical writers and artists in Colorado. They viewed the original handwritten manuscript of Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel Ramona, books by Ann Zwinger, artists’ books by Alicia Bailey and others, and postcard collages by Mary Chenoweth.

Special Collections is home to the papers of Chenoweth, an artist who taught at Colorado College from 1953 until 1983. She made sculptures, woodcarvings, woodcuts, watercolor and oil paintings, etchings, and more. Making art was an everyday activity for her, and she frequently created one-of-a-kind postcard collages and mailed them to friends and family.

The Pen Women usually do some kind of writing exercise at their meetings. This time, instead, they made their own postcard collages, using recycled materials such as scraps from magazines and catalogs. I hope the club members will do as Chenoweth did and mail their postcards to friends and loved ones. Perhaps we can start a home-made-postcard-making trend!