While some alumni and members of the Dartmouth Community hold on to the days of their Winter Carnivals simply through memories, others have gone the route of collecting more substantial memoirs such as classic Carnival posters.
These posters, which commemorate each year's theme, are often valuable and expensive antiques.
Students may recognize these valuable commodities as they hang in the halls of Thayer Dining Hall and Collis Center.
Poster prices vary widely depending on their year and condition.
Older posters that are in good condition can typically go for around $2,000 at auction houses. One of the highest selling Winter Carnival poster is a 1947 poster sold in 2002 for $4,600 at Swann Galleries, a Manhattan auction house that has been selling the posters annually for several years.
At the time, Swann Galleries President Nicolas D. Lowry told The Dartmouth that he attributed the high selling price to the fact that the poster had never been offered before. He believed that most of the bidders were Dartmouth alumni, as a rare 1935 University of New Hampshire poster also up for auction did not receive any bids.
A few posters prior to the 1960s can be found on eBay for less than 20 dollars, although some on that site are priced up to $1,000.
Other posters can be ordered online from the web sites of rare poster collectors at prices ranging from approximately $200 to $500.
Reprints of all the Winter Carnival posters since 1940 can be found on dartmouthimages.com for approximately $45.
Students wanting original posters can begin their collections today, as recent posters along with the current poster are sold in Thayer in the weeks leading up to Carnival.
Rauner Special Collections Library contains a significant number of other interesting Carnival items, which are not on permanent display but are available upon request to any interested parties.
Archives specialist Barbara Krieger noted that more people visit the collections in the weeks leading up to Winter Carnival than during the rest of the year.
One particularly interesting item in the collection is a plastic bag that held snow form the sculpture of 1987, the 47.5 foot snowman inducted into the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's largest at the time.
The Collection also boasts the Queen of Snows crown. From 1923 to 1973 the crown was awarded to one female visitor to campus each year -- it features five silver snowflakes and a capital D in the middle of the center snowflake.
Other items -- including newspaper and magazine articles, souvenir programs and tickets -- are also available for viewing.
In a 1947 copy of Sport magazine the collection holds, Harold Kaese described Winter Carnival in a way that Dartmouth Community members can still appreciate.
"The annual Dartmouth Winter Carnival ... is at once a social event, an athletic meet and a beauty contest," Kaese wrote. "As a combination ice circus, party paradise and Mardi Gras of the Northland, the Winter Carnival is the frosting on the cake of college life in Hanover, New Hampshire."
