Kenneth Spencer Research Library

In 1775, the chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele developed a striking shade of green that proliferated in the Western markets, creating a cultural phenomenon that could be — and in some cases was — deadly. Scheele’s green, a brighter and cheaper pigment to produce than previously popular shades, was one of many arsenical compounds that was used in soap, clothing, wallpaper, and even food for much of the nineteenth century. But the arsenic present in Scheele’s green (and pigments like it) can still be unsafe when handled for extended periods, which means a book that contains this Victorian Era pigment could pose its own risks today.

Step One: Publication Date

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, bookbinders began constructing their own covers separately from the main textblock of each book. This, along with the introduction of a new cover material called bookcloth, allowed Victorian Era book covers to be elaborately dyed and decorated with an array of pigments; Scheele’s green and Paris green (or emerald green, or copper acetoarsenite) being the most arsenic-rich among them. Tracking these new developments, arsenical bookbindings are most likely to be found between the years 1820 and 1880, when the pigments began to be phased out slowly and irregularly across different regions. Because of this, any green book published in the nineteenth century could be a contender.

Step Two: Pigment

Arsenical pigmentscan take many forms, but they are most associated with the vibrant, almost neon shade of green that is shown in the first image, of Die Staatsforstwirthschaftslehre. In some cases, arsenical green stands out like a poison dart frog, but in other cases it’s not so clear. Many of the arsenical titles we’ve identified in KU’s collections align with this typical green pigment, but there have also been some surprises, such as the bright blue book in the image above, or greens that appear to be Scheele’s or emerald but chemically are not. This is where X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) technology comes in.

Step Three: XRF Technology

Due to all these variables, the only sure way to identify a poison book is to test it. In the Spencer Research Library’s conservation lab, we’ve been using XRF technology to test KU’s 19th-century books as part of a larger effort protecting patrons against potentially toxic heavy metals. This machine produces a spectrum graph that allows us to identify which elements are present in an item. Through this process, we’ve identified a number of “poison books” which can now be properly labeled, contained, and served in the reading room with appropriate precautions assuring that the information in a potentially harmful book remains accessible while the patron handling it remains safe.

By Reece Wohlford, Heavy Metals in Bookbinding Project Student Assistant

I began the Ringle Conservation Internship during the summer of 2025. The position interested me as a Museum Studies graduate student, as a hobbyist medium-format photographer, and as someone interested in conservation/archives as a career. I would not have been able to flourish in this position without the leadership of Whitney Baker and Charissa Pincock, and the support of conservation staff members Angela Andres, Kaitlin McGrath, and the many student workers who shared the laboratory with us. Each one of these persons readily and willingly offered their knowledge throughout the process.

Over the summer of 2025, I rehoused circa 2,500 glass plate negatives from the Hannah Scott Collection in the Kenneth Spencer Research Library Conservation Laboratory. This collection encompasses thousands of negatives taken by Hannah Scott, a photographer most prolific from the 1910s through 1945 who hand-recorded the names associated with the photograph onto the plates themselves. The plates were moved from old, now acidic, slip-sleeve housing into alkaline 4-flap housing to prevent image transfer and physical damage during access. I worked chronologically after my predecessors, beginning with photos taken in early 1939 and ending with those taken in early 1944. During this process, I recorded the variations of Scott’s handwriting to make deciphering her handwriting more streamlined (pictured below).

Using online records resources such as FamilySearch, FindAGrave, and the Independence Public Library, I was able to match plates to missing names, and to find the first names of married persons. As I worked through the wartime years, seeing the same subjects return to Scott’s studio, I was able to witness firsthand the effect the war had on people’s lives (see below).

Whether it was business, public, or private, the war seemed to pervade all aspects of these subjects’ life. While this wartime way of life is foreign to me, it can be made familiar through studying the subjects whose lives are preserved in the valuable glass plates of Hannah Scott.

Richard David Godsil III
Summer 2025 Ringle Conservation Intern
Conservation Services

In the course of my work as a conservator at KU Libraries, one of my favorite bookbinding features to spot “in the wild” is paste paper. A book covered in paste paper might come to the lab for treatment, or I might catch sight of one while working in the stacks, and I always take a moment to look at them closely and enjoy the variety of colors, patterns, and styles that paste papers come in. It was no easy task to narrow down Spencer’s abundant selection of paste papers to just a few volumes that will be on view in a temporary exhibit in the North Gallery through August and September.

Paste paper is a style of decorative paper made by coating the surface of paper with a thick pigmented starch adhesive (usually wheat paste or methylcellulose) and then manipulating the wet paste mixture to create patterns. Combs, stamps, brushes, wadded paper or textiles, rollers, fingers and more could be used to create designs. Paste papers were an economical alternative to marbled papers, which required a high degree of skill and costly materials to produce. No special training or supplies were needed to make paste papers; bookbinders could create them right in their workshops with materials already at hand. 

Paste papers were most often used for book covers and endpapers and were popular from the late 16^th through the 18^th century. Paste papers are often seen on books from Germany and Northern Europe, although there are many lovely examples of block-printed paste papers from Italy. There was renewed interest in paste papers during the Arts & Crafts movement of the late 19^th and early 20^th century. Today, paste papers are still created by book artists and hobbyists, and can be seen on some fine-press editions. The examples on view represent just a fraction of the many beautiful paste papers found in Spencer’s collections and available to view in the Reading Room.

Pulled (or veined) paste papers were created by coating two sheets of paper with the colored paste, pressing the two pasted sides together, and then pulling the sheets apart, creating a unique wave-like pattern on each sheet.

Drawn paste papers (also called scraped or combed) were made by “fingerpainting” in the wet paste or dragging various implements through the paste layer. The results can range from painterly and whimsical to clean and graphic. A faux wood graining tool was used to create the pattern on Summerfield E156 (second from left).

These are two very different examples of daubed paste papers: a boldly colored design executed in a thick layer of paste, and a subtle pattern possibly created with stiff brush bristles.

This charming stamped (or printed) design appears, appropriately, on the cover of a book about decorative papers used in bookbinding. An assortment of stamps in architectural shapes were pressed into the paste to create the pattern. Spattered (or sprinkled) papers were made by loading a brush with the colored paste mixture and striking the brush while holding it above the paper, creating a shower of drops.

Block printed paste papers used a matrix, probably carved as for a woodblock print, that was “inked” with the colored paste and stamped onto the paper. These designs can be simple or ornate and often use multiple colors. On Summerfield C1300 (at left) the binder used block printed papers in two different patterns.

In these examples the makers have used a combination of techniques on a single sheet: stamped over drawn, drawn over pulled, and so on. D2763 (at right) is also an example of a paste paper created using a colored sheet of paper, instead of white or light paper, as the starting point.

In Conservation Services we sometimes make paste papers to use in our own bookbinding models or in book making activities for colleagues or the public. Making paste papers is a fun and messy activity that invites exploration of colors, patterns, and mark-making tools. There are many online tutorials for making paste papers at home; bookbinder Erin Fletcher has a great video and written instructions on her blog. Tutorial // Paste Papers – Flash of the Hand

For more on paste papers, see Head of Conservation Services Whitney Baker’s 2012 blog post: Kenneth Spencer Research Library Blog » Historic Fingerpainting Seems More Dignified.

Angela Andres, special collections conservator

I began working as the Ringle Conservation Intern during the fall of 2024, drawn to the position as an art history graduate student with a budding interest in art conservation and passion for collecting antique photographs. Throughout the course of the semester, and the beginning of the spring 2025 semester, I was able to rehouse 2,400 glass plate negatives and contribute to the online database that will be used towards the creation of a future finding aid. Under the guidance of the incredibly kind and knowledgeable conservation staff, such as Whitney Baker, Charissa Pincock, and Kaitlin McGrath, I was able to take my first steps into the world of conservation and archival work, and will look back at this time fondly.

Throughout my time at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library Conservation Lab, I was privileged with the ability of looking into the past through the eyes of Hannah Scott, the Independence, Kansas based photographer and studio owner who operated from the 1910’s into the 1940’s. Each glass plate negative that I carefully removed from their aged and yellowed envelopes showed me a moment frozen in time; a bride on her wedding day with her bouquet cascading to the floor, a baby with a wide, toothless, grin clutching a doll, or an elderly couple still donning the out-of-fashion garb of decades past. I became an undetected observer from a distant time, one who was able to watch children and families grow over the years as they returned time and time again to Hannah’s studio.

As I made my way through the collection I was repeatedly met with glass plates that possessed faint scratches outlining the contours of a face where wrinkles tend to form, or scribbled dots speckling the skin. I continuously wondered what these etchings might be when I came across a plate that had two negatives of the same woman, but on one she was heavily freckled, and in the other, there was not a spot on her skin to be found. On the emulsion side of the plate, her freckles had been meticulously removed one-by-one with a pointed instrument of sorts to render her skin seemingly airbrushed. I instantly recognized that these “scratches” were an example of the pre-digital age method of “photoshopping” photographs, a technique that Hannah would employ to provide her customers with the option of having a perfect portrait to display.

I had read about the act of manually retouching glass plate negatives in the Victorian era, where the outer edges of a woman’s mid-section were erased to achieve the desired “wasp-waist” look. However, I thought this was an outlying and rare occurrence, but the fact that almost every plate of Hannah’s bears some evidence of retouching shows how common and pervasive this practice was. Furthermore, there was not a specific demographic of Hannah’s client that received this treatment; men and women of all ages, from infants to seniors, were able to take home a photograph of themselves looking their absolute best. Excess stray hairs, deep set wrinkles from decades of emoting, blemishes, freckles, moles, or an accidental hand or prop in the image were all able to be removed by the dedicated photographer’s technique of building up hair-thin lines to erase the undesired.

After doing some research of my own, I discovered that the practice of manually retouching glass plate negatives had been in place since the 1840s, and involved the use of either a graphite pencil or knife to scratch out or cover up whatever it may be that was preventing the desired image. Such retouching appeared almost invisible, both in the glass plate negative and in the final positive. I was able to see evidence of the retouching only when I viewed the emulsion side of the negative from a certain angle where the light could reflect off the scratches. Such a trick-of-the trade exemplifies how not so different we are today from those who lived almost a hundred years ago, and how certain behaviors, such as the editing of photographed portraits, show a formidable continuity over time. I can almost imagine the scene appearing in front of me; Hannah in her studio hunched over a negative, surrounded by various tools and instruments, a soft, rhythmic, scratching noise permeates the air as she works on perfecting her customer’s portrait, the hours ticking by, a radio playing a vintage tune hums in the background, unknowingly creating the plate that would end up in my very hands all these years later.

For further reading on manual retouching of glass plate negatives see https://pastonglass.wordpress.com/2017/11/28/the-art-of-retouching-pre-photoshop/ and https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/83262/how-photo-retouching-worked-photoshop

Alessia Serra
2024-2025 Ringle Conservation Intern
Conservation Services

Currently, I am treating a group of parchment leaves that make up a legal document. The text discusses partitions of land in Wickenby and Great Humby, hamlets in Lincolnshire, England. The document is dated September 21, 1716.

The large pieces of animal skin are affixed to one another with sewing and fourteen red wax seals. Each seal was stamped with a heart, pierced by two arrows.

How appropriate to discover fourteen red hearts on a document on Valentine’s Day, February 14!

Whitney Baker
Head, Conservation Services