By Gwen Hawkes

Bustling among the Gothic archways of Duke’s West Campus, many students never realize that the walls around them are full of hidden symbolism. When the campus was built between 1927 and 1932, a crew of stone carvers employed by John Donnelly, Inc., of New York was commissioned to create the decorative flourishes, stately emblems, and sneering gargoyles that bedeck the university’s buildings and rooftops. Unfortunately, little else is known about the men responsible for these works of art. According to former University Archivist William E. King, it is thought that many of the workers were Irish craftsmen, drawn to America by the promise of work, only to return home upon its completion. (A few stayed in Durham for the rest of their lives.)

The larger mystery surrounding Duke’s stonework is the meaning of the decorations and symbols themselves— particularly those engraved on the recently renamed David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Beneath the windows of the Gothic Reading Room, the front of the library bears twenty-eight stone shields inscribed with various symbols. Because the sculptural designs were left up to the stone carvers themselves, the meaning of these shields has been, for many years, a mystery. The shields were further obscured by several holly trees, effectively blocking them from view, until the trees were removed this summer as part of the library renovation.

University comptroller Frank C. Brown, onetime chair of the English department and founder of the North Carolina Folklore Society, was one of the central figures who oversaw the construction of West Campus. In 1931, Brown contacted the Horace Trumbauer architectural firm in an attempt to discover the significance of the campus carvings. In particular, there was “a demand for an explanation of the various insignia in the Library,” Brown wrote, “because interest in these things increases with the years.” Regrettably, Brown’s letter apparently went unanswered, leaving us to decipher the mystery ourselves.

William Blackburn, legendary professor of English and creative writing at Duke, briefly mentions in his Architecture of Duke University (1946) that the shields on the library represent the various arts and sciences. However after much symbolic detective work, it seems this may be an oversimplification. The shield carvings, which range from the obvious (an open book) to the enigmatic (two rabbits supporting a globe on muscular shoulders) make use of a range of symbolic traditions, from Greek and Roman mythology to Masonic conventions.

Several of the emblems correspond with academic and intellectual endeavors: a lyre to represent poetry, a pair of scales for law or justice, a painter’s palette and brush denoting the visual arts. But most have more subtle meanings. A beehive perhaps represents diligence and industry. A winged hourglass warns against the rapid passage of time and shortness of human life. The lamp of knowledge burns brightly to symbolize enlightenment and education. Despite our best guesses, some of the shields remain stubbornly shrouded in secrecy, to the continuing puzzlement and delight of the viewer. However, each relays some snippet of wisdom to the stream of students racing along beneath them.

Gwen Hawkes (T’16) is an English major and Library Communications Assistant at Duke.

Cracking the Code

Visit our Flickr site to find a full gallery of the library’s stone shields and our best educated guesses about their meanings. A few of the images defied decoding. Their meaning remains tantalizingly elusive. If you can fill in the missing pieces, or correct our interpretations, let us know! Send your brilliant insights, wild conjectures, and learned annotations to Aaron Welborn, editor, at aaron.welborn@duke.edu. We’ll publish the most persuasive contributions as an update in the next issue of the magazine.

Photo Credit: Wunderman

The John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History has acquired the papers of direct marketing pioneer Lester Wunderman and will become the corporate archive of the global marketing firm he founded half a century ago. Lester Wunderman is the chairman emeritus and founder of Wunderman, one of the largest advertising, marketing, and consulting companies in the world. He is credited with pioneering a number of direct marketing concepts that are now firmly established practices of modern-day advertising—such as the toll-free 1-800 number, the credit card customer rewards program, and the tipped-in magazine subscription card. Even the term “direct marketing” is widely attributed to him. He was inducted in the Direct Marketing Hall of Fame in 1983. Now the papers of Lester Wunderman, along with those of the agency he founded in 1958, will be housed at the Hartman Center. It is the first significant collection documenting direct marketing to be given to the Hartman Center.

According to the Princeton Review, Duke University is home to one of the very best college libraries in the country (second only to Harvard). The Princeton Review, a college-preparatory company, asked students at 373 top colleges to rate their schools on dozens of topics (from professor quality to athletic facilities) and report on their campus experiences. The rankings are based on surveys of 122,000 undergraduates (an average of 325 per campus) during the 2009-10 academic year. The results are published in The Best 373 Colleges: 2011 Edition (Random House/Princeton Review).

James Longley, documentary filmmaker and 2009 MacArthur Fellow, visited campus on October 29 to inaugurate the Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel Visiting Filmmaker Series. Longley joined Diamonstein-Spielvogel, the series’ namesake, on stage at the Nasher Museum of Art for a public conversation about his films and current projects. He is the director of several award-winning documentaries, including Iraq in Fragments, Sari’s Mother, and Gaza Strip. The Diamonstein-Spielvogel Visiting Filmmaker Series features artists whose work addresses significant contemporary topics of social, political, economic, and cultural urgency. Filmmakers chosen to participate will have a recognized body of work and show promise of future contributions to documentary filmmaking.

Photo credit: John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

Duke University has joined a group of leading research institutions in signing a Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity (COPE). The goal of the compact is to make it easier for researchers to publish their work in open-access scholarly journals, where it would be freely available online.

As part of its commitment to COPE, Duke has created a special fund to help pay for article processing fees associated with open-access publishing. COPE aims to encourage open access by supporting Duke authors who find such fees an obstacle to publication. The fund, which will be administered by the Libraries’ Office of Scholarly Communications, is supported by the Duke University Libraries and the Office of the Provost.

According to Provost Peter Lange, the aims of COPE are in keeping with Duke’s continued emphasis on knowledge in the service of society. “By establishing this fund, we hope to support the university’s commitment to promoting openness as an important value in scholarship,” Lange said. “Increased open access means more opportunities for the research of our faculty and researchers to reach a wide audience and have a meaningful impact on the world.”

The Association of Southeastern Research Libraries (ASERL) has selected Aisha Harvey, Head of Collection Development at Duke University’s Perkins Library, to serve as the organization’s first Visiting Program Officer. ASERL is the largest regional research library consortium in the United States. Harvey will lead the development of a cooperative print journal retention program for ASERL member libraries. The program will seek out new ways of sharing the costs and effort of archiving little-used print journals among libraries in the consortium. Her work with ASERL will be a six-month assignment, starting in October. Harvey worked on designing and implementing a single-copy agreement between Duke University and other research libraries in the Research Triangle. According to Harvey, “ASERL is uniquely positioned to make sure future researchers in the region can inherit a thoughtfully designed print archive of our collective assets.”

Emily Daly, Instruction and Outreach Librarian and Coordinator of Upper Level Instruction, has been selected by the American Library Association (ALA) as one of 83 Emerging Leaders for 2011. The Emerging Leaders program enables newer library workers from across the country to participate in problem-solving work groups, network with peers, gain an inside look into ALA structure, and have an opportunity to serve the profession in a leadership capacity. Participants must be under 35 years old or have fewer than five years of experience working in the library profession. Daly has worked for Duke University Libraries since August 2006. As Coordinator of Upper Level Instruction, she is responsible for developing innovative ways to make instructional materials and services available for upper level undergraduate and graduate students. As an ALA Emerging Leader, she will develop and work on a six-month professional project with two other program participants, the results of which will presented at the American Library Association annual conference in New Orleans in summer 2011.

A student string quartet performs at the entrance of Perkins Library as part of the Duke Arts Festival October 22-November 7. Throughout the festival, student artwork—including painting, photography, poetry, sculpture, performance, digital art, animation, music, and film—was on display throughout Duke’s campus, including bus stops and other casual locations, in order to create an immersive arts experience for Duke students.

The Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) and Duke University have selected Hostage Nation: Colombia’s Guerrilla Army and the Failed War on Drugs (Knopf, 2010) as the winner of the third annual WOLA-Duke Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America.

The authors of the winning book—Victoria Bruce, Karin Hayes and Jorge Enrique Botero—were honored at a special reception in the Biddle Rare Book Room on December 7, where they were presented with a $1,000 cash award.

WOLA, a human rights research and advocacy group established in 1974, and Duke University created the prize to honor the best current, non-fiction book published in English on human rights, democracy and social justice in contemporary Latin America. In addition to the Duke University Libraries’ Archive for Human Rights, the Duke Human Rights Center and the Duke Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies co-sponsor the award.