Kenneth Spencer Research Library

Public Services Student Assistant Eleni Roussopoulos writes of a favorite discovery from the stacks.

One day while re-shelving books in Spencer’s Special Collections book stacks my attention was caught by a navy-blue box on a lower shelf. Unable to walk away without knowing the contents of the box, I carefully opened it. Inside this box lives a three-volume set of hand-made books titled Sword and Blossom Poems from the Japanese Done into English Verse by Shotaro Kimura and Charlotte M.A. Peake,  [1908 – 1910].

The three volumes of Sword and Blossom Poems from the Japanese / done into English verse by Shotaro
Kimura & Charlotte M.A. Peake ; illustrated by Japanese artists. Tokyo: T. Hasegawa, Meiji 41 [1908-1910].
Call Number B3136.  Click image to enlarge.

Each volume features both “Sword” and “Blossom” poems, where the text is accompanied by woodcuts from various Japanese artists and is printed by woodblock (rather than by moveable type). The “Blossom Songs” are tanka (short unrhymed poems) translated from the Kokinshū anthology of Japanese poems compiled circa 905 C.E.

 “Blossom Songs” half title, with list of illustrations for the second volume;
“Snow,” with a reproduction of a Hiroshige snow scene, and “Misere” and “Maple Leaves,”
with illustration by Kohō, from the “Blossom Songs” section of the first volume of Sword and
Blossom Poems from the Japanese. Call Number B3136. Click images to enlarge.

The “Sword Songs” were composed in the Chinese style by various Japanese authors. In the introduction, the editor informs the reader that the “the spirit that breathes through [the sword songs] is the spirit that has animated the warriors of Japan from the earliest days.”

The “Sword Songs” section title page and “A Sword Dance of the Satsuma Clan, ” both with illustrations by Gesso, from
volume two of Sword and Blossom Poems from the Japanese.  Call Number B3136. Click images to enlarge.

These surprisingly sturdy hand-made books, with crepe-paper covered boards, were published in Tokyo by T. Hasegawa at the beginning of the twentieth century.  Gorgeous and fascinating to look at, these short books offer an excellent example of the now-vanishing art of Japanese wood-block printing.

Eleni Roussopolous
Public Services Student Assistant

One challenging thing about conducting research in a special collections library and archives is that you can’t “browse” the stacks as you might in a circulating collection.  There are plenty of fortuitous discoveries to be made at Spencer, but they don’t come from your eye alighting on the volume two books down from the one that you went to the shelf to retrieve.

However, thanks to a new functionality in the KU Libraries online catalog, there is now a way to “browse” some of the Spencer Library’s collections.  This exciting new functionality bears a descriptive–if technical-sounding–name:  the “left-anchored call number” search (see below for a screenshot).

The term “left-anchored” refers to the fact that the catalog will retrieve any items whose call numbers begin with the word or series of letters that you enter into the search box.  This is useful because many of the Spencer Library’s discrete collections (such as the William Butler Yeats Collection or the Wilcox Collection of Contemporary Political Movements) have distinctive call numbers that begin with a common word or series of letters.  For example, all items in the named Yeats collection have call numbers that begin with “Yeats,” and all items in the Wilcox Collection have call numbers that begin with “RH WL” (or, even more specifically, the manuscripts that are in the Wilcox collection begin with the call number “RH WL MS” ).  Thus, if you enter those words or series of letters and select “Left-anchored call number”  from the search options, you will be able to “browse” the catalog records for the items in the collection.

You can then use the “sort results by” function (which is found at the top left of the results page) to sort the results by date (either earliest or most recent first), author, or title. 

Below is an example (with screenshots) to help illustrate this process.

Imagine you are interested in browsing printed materials in the Spencer Library’s Willliam J. Griffith Collection, a collection of books, newspapers, broadsheets, and printed ephemera focusing on Guatemala (and Central America more broadly) from the late eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century.  Since all call numbers for this collection begin with the word “Griffith,” you can pull up all of the online catalog records for that collection by conducting a left-anchored call number search for that term:

Then you can sort the results by date (earliest first) to browse by date.  (Note: this means that you’ll receive all of the records for undated materials first, followed by the dated materials in chronological order.)

There is a second handy use for the left-anchored call number search: it allows you to look up a Spencer Library item by its call number.  This can be helpful when you have jotted down a call number for an item, but you can’t remember its precise title.  Simply enter the full call number in the search box (e.g. RH D213), and then  select the left-anchored call number option.  In no time you’ll be looking at the record for RH D213, which turns out to be In Preparation–a standard history of Kansas and Kansans, written and compiled by William E. Connelley.

The left-anchored call number search isn’t the be-all and end-all for searching Spencer’s collections.  For example, it’s less helpful for working with non-discrete collections such as the general rare books collection or the general Kansas Collection holdings, and it doesn’t help you identify all of the books by a specific author or on a given subject since these may span several collections.  However, it does provide you with another helpful tool for navigating the Spencer Library’s  fascinating holdings.

Ready to start browsing discrete collections?  Listed below are several (though by no means all) of the Spencer Library’s distinctive call numbers.  To learn more about distinctive call numbers within the Kansas Collection, Special Collections, and the University Archives, please contact a staff member.

The Beginning String of Several Spencer Research Library Call Numbers
MS = Special Collections manuscript collections call numbers
RH MS = Kansas Collection manuscript collections call numbers
RH MS-P = Photographic materials in the Kansas Collection call numbers
RH Ser =Kansas Collection Serials and Periodicals call numbers
PP = Personal papers in the University Archives call numbers
RH WL= Wilcox Collection of Contemporary Political Movements call numbers [***]
Josephson = Josephson Collection call numbers  (collection of leftist political literature dating primarily from the first half of the twentieth century)
RH H-J = Haldeman-Julius collection  call numbers (Girard, Kansas publisher of  the “Little Blue Book” series of inexpensive books on subjects such as self-improvement, philosophy, religion, politics, humor, biography, music, literature, science, and sex education)
KAC = Kansas Authors Club collection call numbers
Summerfield = Summerfield Collection of Renaissance and Early Modern Books call numbers (printed works in Continental Europe from 1455 up through 1700)
O’Hegarty = P.S. O’Hegarty Colletion call numbers (Irish politics and literature and other printed works from the library of Irish nationalist P. S. O’Hegarty) [***]
Joyce = Spoerri Collection of James Joyce call numbers
18th Century =18th century British pamphlets call numbers (covering poetry, drama, prose, politics and economics, and religion)
Ellis Aves =Ellis Ornithology collection call numbers
ASF= American Science Fiction collection call numbers
UA = Faculty publications, University of Kansas Press publications, and other publications associated with the University Archives call numbers [***]

[***]   Please note that for collections that exceed 10,000 items in size (marked with three asterisks above), the left-anchored call number search will return only the first 10,000 items.

Elspeth Healey
Special Collections Librarian

Former conservation student assistant Haley Trezise reports on how she met the challenge of safely housing a group of metal Jayhawks.

I could hear the individual metal pieces sliding around inside before I even opened the box containing the metal Jayhawk paraphernalia.  There was a small metal pendant set aside in an envelope; however, the rest of the items in the collection were awkwardly arranged at the bottom of a tall, slender box.  Projects like this challenged me to find or make appropriate housing for Spencer items.

The challenge: A note to the archivist and two of several metal Jayhawk items all to be housed together.
Spencer Library Call Number: RG 0/25

I worked as a conservation student employee and Museum Studies intern during my last two semesters at KU.  For one of my projects as an intern, I was asked to upgrade the housing for some metal Jayhawk paraphernalia.  The parameters: all material should stay together in one box, including the accompanying written documents.  I was provided a rather small, off-the-shelf box and told that all items should fit within that enclosure.

A new nest for metal Jayhawks.  Spencer Library Call Number: RG 0/25

After considering various arrangements for best placement, I used  plastazote foam, an inert (non-damaging) material that is easily shaped, to cut indentions for each object. I took a picture of the  proper place for each item and placed it, along with the written information, in a sleeve inside the lid of the box.  The image of what is stored in the box was also attached to the outside of the box so that the archivists can see what is inside without opening the lid.

Photos affixed to the exterior of the housing reveal at a glance the Jayhawk paraphernalia contained inside.
Spencer Library Call Number: RG 0/25. Click image to enlarge.

Haley Trezise
Former Conservation Student Assistant

In his book on the viper, Nouvelles experiences sur la vipere, Parisian apothecary Moyse (or Moïse) Charas takes to task Italian physician, naturalist, and poet Francesco Redi (1626-1697), for his scientific study of viper bites, the first such research ever. Charas was of the opinion (and not alone in it) that venom per se was harmless and that death was caused by poisonous spirits injected into the victim by the mind of an infuriated viper. Charas’s title-page shows two vipers entwined as in the caduceus, or staff of Mercury, one of the symbols of the medical profession. The Aesculapian staff, after the Greco-Roman God of medicine and healing, Aesculapius, is branched at the top with a single snake twined around it; it is the official insignia of the American Medical Association.

Charas, Moyse (1618-1698). Nouvelles experiences sur la vipere.
A Paris: chez l’auteur et Olivier de Varennes, 1669. Ellis Omnia B30.
Click image to enlarge.

Charas recommended viper as a staple of the diet and as a preventive and cure for a good many diseases. His 17th century compatriot and contemporary Pierre Pomet (1658-1699) recommended distilled salts of viper to prevent measles, smallpox, plague, and scurvy, and to cure gout, rheumatisum, and venereal disease. Viper heart was prescribed for mealcholia. In another book, Trakat über den Theriak, Charas extols theriac, an anti-leprosy medicine made from powdered snake and used since antiquity; in medieval Europe the powder was formed into tablets, stamped with a snake image, and used against the bubonic plague. But that ain’t nothin’; our American frontiersmen gladly bought greasy-kid-stuff from snake-oil salesmen who took their money and swore the oil would grow hair back on their heads and cure the goiter to boot.

On the added engraved title-page of the Spencer Library’s copy (pictured above) is the inscription of the book’s former owner, French pharmacist and botanist Jean Leon Soubeiran (1827-1892). Soubeiran was the author of books on materia medica from all the kingdoms of nature–plant, animal, and mineral–including one on the venom of poisonous snakes.

Sally Haines
Rare Books Cataloger
Adapted from her Spencer Research Library exhibit and catalog, Slithy Toves: Illustrated Classic Herpetological Books at the University of Kansas in Pictures and Conservations.