CARLI Digitized Book of the Month – April 2016

Have you ever wondered how yearbooks get their names? Some are prosaic, straightforwardly derived from the name of the college or university—and why shouldn’t they be? Yearbooks don’t really need their own names, after all. Others are inventive, as in newly made-up words: Millidek (Millikin University + its location Decatur); Illiwoco (MacMurray College, previously ILLInois WOman’s COllege). Yet others allude to institutional symbols: Spoon River College’s Shield (former mascot: the Crusaders); Judson College’s Lantern (motto: Christus Lux Mundi). And every once in a while, one will seize upon the yearbook’s purpose as retrospective.

…Which brings me to Recensio, the name adopted for the Rockford College yearbook in 1959. Coming from the Latin, it means enumeration, review, reassessment—an apt title for a volume recounting the 5W1H of the academic year.

The first hint that the 1972 Recensio might be a little bit different appears on the cover, or rather doesn’t: no date, no title, just a simple graphic of a bicycle spanning back and front. This yearbook isn’t a recension, it’s a poem. Aside from name-captioned photos and the usual end sections of business ads and index, the entire text consists of stream of consciousness free verse written by co-editor Jean Hoffman. On one level it’s the story of a man named Sam, the woman he loves named Julia, and his trusty companion named Schwinn (see cover). Paired with the black-and-white images of faces and places frozen in time, it becomes something more dreamlike and evocative—a prescient memory.

In the future, does it matter anymore who the officers of the student clubs were? Who was on the athletic teams, what the season records were—years later, would anybody still care? These are the things we remember: questing for knowledge and truth, falling in love, the sensation of being young and alive and free.

Written by Ellen K. Corrigan, Associate Professor, Cataloging Services, Booth Library, Eastern Illinois University

This volume was contributed by the Howard Colman Library, Rockford University. You can find this volume and others from CARLI participant libraries in the Internet Archive.