Quips & Cranks distributed free copies of the 2024-25 yearbook in Union on Friday after returning from a five year hiatus, thanks to the work of Editor-in-Chief Lanie Demarcay ’27 and the Quips & Cranks staff.
When Demarcay was touring Davidson, the mention of a college yearbook excited her. It was an opportunity to envelop herself in a new community. When she arrived and found Quips & Cranks was inactive, she set out to revive it.
“I came to campus, and I realized the club had kind of faded out around Covid,” Demarcay said. “I went, ‘okay, well, this seems like a pretty beloved campus tradition. Let’s work on trying to bring it back.’”
Demarcay spent her freshman year trying to justify re-establishing the yearbook. Her advocacy paid off, and plans began to take shape.
“My sophomore year, that was 2024-25, we finally got the green light from Miss Emily Eisenstadt, who has been an incredible support throughout this entire time, and we [received funding from] the ATC,” Demarcay said. “Every student leadership position on campus was very supportive of us coming back, especially when I had nothing to prove that we could actually do this.”
With a group of motivated students, Demarcay began the hard part: making the yearbook.
“All last year, I had a team of around 35-ish students–a little bit more, sometimes– working hard and creating pages, taking photos, writing stories, and we just worked from August all the way up until the end of May, even after school was let out, getting this book finished, collecting stories, telling everything,” Demarcay said.
The yearbook club consists of students who were just as eager as Demarcay, including Maureen Cavanaugh ’27.
“We’re lucky to have people who have experience from doing their high school yearbook or something like that, or are just interested in learning a new kind of skill,” Cavanaugh said.
“We have a lot of people who are really passionate about, you know, contributing to our community that way. So it’s been really great.”
In their effort to capture Davidson’s communal spirit, Quips & Cranks became a lively community itself. “Our planning meetings are really, really fun because everyone’s working on their section or their page, and they come back to the group and they have different ideas or and something exciting that they decided to do with a page, and you get to see the drafts and everything,” Cavanaugh said.
“It’s kind of fun to see this creation come to life over the course of the whole year, because we started with 200 blank pages, and then created something out of that. Working with all the people who helped make that possible [has] been a really rewarding experience.”
With one issue under their belts, Demarcay and the team already have ideas for the next edition.
“We want to cover more events on campus [to] showcase what it’s like to live [at Davidson] on a day to day, not just the big things like Fall Fling, [or] the great Davidson debate, but more of the small things,” Demarcay said.
The club intends to host more events, like a release party and a photo day. “We would like to host a photo day, so students can come onto campus and get their picture taken,” Demarcay said.
“It’s not just for the yearbook. [Students] will get access to these photos. It will also allow us just to have current photos, photos that everyone’s happy with. One of the challenges [in the recent edition] was also getting names correct. [Picture day] will allow [students] to submit and use [their] preferred names.”
The 2024-25 edition of Quips & Cranks became available to students on Oct. 17. During the preceding two days, the club distributed 611 copies, not including the over 100 yearbooks sent to members from the Class of 2025.
The books are free to any and all students. Director of Alvarez College Union and Student Activities Emily Eisenstadt––and the faculty member to whom this edition is dedicated––worked with the Activities Tax Council (ATC) to establish the club’s budget, and helped ensure students would not pay for the yearbook. “The [production] cost for each one is like $60-50 and not necessarily accessible to everybody,” Eisenstadt said.
“The idea to make them free was part of [Quips and Cranks’] budget with the ATC,” Eisenstadt continued. “Pre-pandemic, when the yearbook was up and running, they were also free. At the time, [students] would get a yearbook from [their] first year at Davidson, [and their] last year at Davidson. But in this iteration of Quips & Cranks, anybody that wants one should be able to take one.”
For Demarcay, the yearbooks are not just keepsakes, but also pieces of college history. “The yearbook isn’t just something for students to cherish,” Demarcay said. “It’s useful not only for our students. It’s useful for the archives. It’s useful for admissions. We are creating something that is going to outlast us. It’ll stay with Davidson. You look back on the old, old, old books from the 1930s and all those students have long since moved on from Davidson […] our team is contributing to that.”