A long time ago a friend at the University of Pennsylvania, I think, told me–or maybe I read it somewhere–that a thing at colleges, pre-computers or anything, was for guys to pass around a collection of pictures of incoming freshman girls, to see the new pickings, and this was called “The Pig Book.” And Harvard had one, and some clever people made it available on line, and the rest is history.
Has anyone heard this? Or even of the phenomenon–as well as the name–of “The Pig Book?”
When I entered Cornell in 1969, I received a copy of the Freshman Register, which contained photos all members of the matriculating freshman class (male and female). This was known informally as the “Pig Book,” because the photos were generally as flattering as most yearbook pictures. I assume most other colleges at the time (at leat the Ivies like Harvard, Cornell, and the University of Pennsylvania) had such a book, which probably had the same or similar nickname.
Possibly this was derived from some early practice of passing around photos, but by the 1960s it was an official printed publication given to incoming freshmen. (I’m not sure if it was published by the University itself or by some student organization, but I suspect the former since it had access to photos of all incoming students.)
At Villanova in the 90s, all freshmen were given a copy of the “meet book”, with pictures of and brief information about the other freshmen, with the goal of making it easier to meet people. Of course, older students got ahold of copies, and it was popularly referred to as the “meat book”, as in finding fresh meat.
At my college, it was unofficially called the “Zoo Book,” and was an official publication given to all incoming freshman, with names and photos (probably yearbook photos) of everyone in the incoming class.
We had the Freshmen Book at Dartmouth, and I’m sure frats used it in that manner. But it was never called anything but the Freshmen Book in general conversation to my knowledge. What they called it in the frats is another story.
The same thing existed when I was in college, as an official document that every freshman got, in the 1980s. We called it the Pig book, too. I still have mine around somewhere, probably.
When I started college in 1985 we were given a book all about the school and included pictures of all the incoming freshman. I still have mine and showed my kids my original “facebook”. We never called it a “pig book”. I can’t remember what we did call it, though.
And yes, we used it to rate the guys.
Ours (at Agnes Scott in 1997) was actually called the “Facebook”.
We had one at Princeton too in the 90s.
Rensselaer, 1984. We had one as well. (Generally, you submitted the same photo that you used for your high school yearbook.)
You’ve never heard of the movieThe Social Network? The one with eight Oscar nominations? Over $200 million in box office grosses? That’s the entire plot of the movie.
We had the Freshman Record when I was in college in 1970 – all the freshmen, plus pictures of faculty and general information (like what restaurants had good pizza). It was only caused “The Freshman Record.” Quite possibly this was due to the fact that ours was the first coed class; previous editions had no women in them and thus no nickname was coined.
Not at Penn in 1954.
I went to USC (Southern Cal, not that yokel place out East) in the 1980s. We did have yearbooks published every year, but they weren’t available until mid summer for the year just ended. We did NOT have any sort of book issued at the start of the school year which covered the incoming freshmen (all 1500 of them in my timeframe).
Gosh, if there were only some kind of digital finding aid with which one could sift through online archives to obtain contemporary documentary evidence about the customs of the past.
If there were, it might come up with campus newspaper articles like this one from 1993:
This “secondary functionality” is probably the source of the OP’s confusion about such pamphlets. Yes, “pig books” at coed colleges were used to scope out pretty women in the freshman class (I remember seeing a male classmate’s copy of our “pig book” in which he had scrawled, next to the dark blurry picture of one of our prettiest female classmates, the words “SHOOT THE PHOTOGRAPHER”), but that was not the ostensible purpose for which the college produced them.
This is my recollection at Northwestern University in the mid-90s (1993-1998). Although I suppose it is conceivable I missed it (though I doubt it.) Yearbooks, yes. Incoming freshmen photos, no.
Our Meat Book (look, I remembered!), was only distributed to the incoming class. We didn’t get books with pictures of the freshman every year.
When I entered the U of Chicago in 1979, all freshmen got a book of the incoming freshmen. There was no nickname for it that I was aware of. I still have it somewhere.
Definitely did not have one of these at UCF in 1999, but we had 9,400 incoming freshmen so it would have been a Pig Encyclopaedia.
Wasn’t one of the frat activities in Animal House having a “pig party”?
The closest I saw to anything like that at the University of Toronto - the Student Union published a phone book of all students. No pics, no bios, basically a phone book. And… according to someone I knew in the Student Union, they threw in a few fake name/address/phone to catch any bulk mailer using the list without permission. Considering a lot of mailing addresses and phones were “back home”, not where the student lived while attending university, it was not as informative as it could be.
I remember a few student directories went online in the very early days of the internet, until it was realized that publishing personal information that openly was a privacy risk.