How was knowledge, ranging from the scientific, pious, entrepreneurial, and artistic, to the preposterous, transmitted through the historic movement of print and manuscript material in and around Japan?

Setting out to tackle this question in Spring 2025, students in the University of Kansas History of Art Department Japanese art history seminar “Manuscripts, Maps, and Illustrated Books” had the opportunity to curate this exhibition, working with materials from The Kenneth Spencer Research Library collection. Selected works range from 1646 to 1936, including detailed cartography, woodblock-printed imagery, and religious paraphernalia. Journeying from Japan to the West and back again, this exhibition spans three centuries and five intersecting themes.

Opened on July 31, 2025, the exhibition’s five cases follow the themes given below. In addition, a special event in the gallery on Wednesday, September 3, 2025 (3:30-4:45) will feature mini presentations on selected works by each seminar student. The exhibit will remain open through January 9, 2026.

1. Mapping and Conceptions of Space demonstrates that as Japan moved toward the 19th century, its awareness of the world beyond its islands gradually increased. Interactions with foreign visitors fostered an exchange of culture and knowledge that diffused into every area of society, including Japanese cartographic practices.

Representations of space in both image and text indicate the geographical information deemed most important. From spiritual landmarks and cosmological beliefs to political boundaries and travel logistics, these historical maps and guides reveal how users’ conceptions of East Asia were shaped at the time.

While overseas travel remained restricted throughout the 17th to 19th centuries, these materials demonstrate an expanding awareness of domestic and global geographies, depicted using both traditional Japanese mapmaking and novel observations from Western travelers.  

2. Tourism and Movement of People explores how travel shaped the visual culture and national identity of Japan from the seventeenth century through the turn of the 20th century. The depictions of elaborate 17th-to 19th-century processions of feudal lords evoke an earlier era of ceremonial travel and spectacle, emphasizing traditional routes and social hierarchies.

Hiroshige Toyokuni meiga hyakushu daimyō dōchū 広重豊国名画百種大名道中
(One Hundred Famous Views of a Daimyo’s Journey by Hiroshige and Toyokuni). Tokyo: Tōkōen, 1918. Call Number: E3579. Click image to enlarge.

By the early 20th century, Japan’s interest in travel shifted toward promoting tourism as a tool for modernization and imperial expansion into regions such as Manchuria (Northeast China), Hokkaido and Korea. Postcards, travel guidebooks, and government-issued pamphlets offered carefully curated images and structured itineraries for both foreign and domestic travelers.

Together, these materials illustrate changing conceptions of travel, from symbolic displays of authority to strategic assertions of national identity.

3. Pilgrimage and Movement of Religions reflects upon the spread of foreign faiths to Japan, as well as the pivotal role of bodily and spiritual journeys within religious beliefs and practices. Originating in India, Buddhism spread to Japan in the sixth century and since developed into a major religion with a profound influence on daily life. Buddhist practitioners frequently visit temples and undertake pilgrimages along designated routes, seeking face-to-face encounters with deities through their icons.

In many legends, sacred Buddhist icons demonstrate miraculous power and compassion by journeying across land and sea. Movement occurs not only across geographical spaces, but also between the earthly realm and Buddhist paradises.

However, not all foreign religions were warmly received in Japan. A few decades after its introduction by Jesuit missionaries, Christianity faced severe persecutions in the late 16th and 17th centuries, reflecting state and local resistance to beliefs imported from distant shores.

4. Trade and Movement of Goods offers a window into the commercial world of Japan and the global trade networks that developed from the movement of goods. Print culture in Japan served not only to document commodities but also to shape how goods were seen, valued, and consumed. From tea catalogs to textile pattern books and beer advertisements, the objects in this case reveal how trade goods were embedded in shifting notions of taste, identity, and national power.

Although trade across East Asia dates back millennia, commercial exchange between Japan and the West began to grow from the 17th century and intensified at the turn of the 20th century. With objects and knowledge flowing between Japan, broader Asia, and the West, print media itself became a commodity, as demand for Japanese goods expanded. These publications offer a window into the commercial world of Japan, its transnational material culture, and the global trade networks that developed from the movement of goods.

5. Virtual Travel and Fantasies of Asia examines printed materials from the 17th to the 20th century that depicted Japan’s culture and shaped Western fantasies of Asia, constructing descriptions that blurred fact and fiction.

Through these objects, virtual travel, the concept of journeying to another place through imagination, was made possible for Europeans and Americans alike.

Japan also capitalized on print media, seeking to reconstruct its self-image as modern and legitimize its global relevance in the 20th century. These books, fashion plates, and inventive illustrations reveal the breadth of cultural dialogue between East and West, offering visions of Japan in which curiosity, exoticization, and national identity came together.

These treasures that traveled out of The Kenneth Spencer Research Library stacks into this exhibition represent but a fraction of the library’s holdings of Asian material, which are all available upon patron request. Notably, several of the items included were collected by Kate Hansen (1879–1968), a Kansan who lived in Japan as a missionary and music teacher during 1907–1941 and 1947–1951.

After finalizing the exhibition details, a new acquisition was made to the library’s collection that fit the exhibition theme so well we decided to add it to a bonus case. Please come look for this wonderful mystery item. Hint: polar bears!

We hope that these displays will move viewers to appreciate how people of the past sought creative strategies that blended image with text to excite and inspire the transmission of knowledge in and around Japan.

Sherry Fowler (drawing from collaborative exhibition text)
Professor of Japanese Art History, History of Art
University of Kansas

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Faculty advisor: Sherry Fowler, Professor of Japanese Art History, History of Art, University of Kansas

Student curators: Yuan-Hsi Chao, Brady Cullen, Aria Diao, Shangyi Lyu, Olivia Song, Emma Smith, Rebekah Staton, Heeryun Suh, Eli Troen, and Morgan Williamson

Library advisor: Eve Wolynes, Special Collections Curator, University of Kansas Libraries

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This is the latest installment in a recurring series of posts introducing readers to the staff of Kenneth Spencer Research Library. Today’s profile features Jason W. Dean, who joined Spencer Research Library in June 2025 as a Rare Materials Cataloging Librarian.

Where are you from?

I was born in Lubbock, Texas, and raised in Midland – both in what I call far West Texas. I went to college in Abilene at a small liberal arts university there, where much of my family went to college. I then taught and lived in the Dallas-Fort Worth area for a few years before starting my library career. My work has taken me several places: Arkansas, central Texas, Kansas City, and now Lawrence. I appreciate Lawrence and how it feels like it’s just in The West, which reminds me of the big skies of my youth.

How did you come to work at Spencer Research Library?

I’ve had the good fortune to know Spencer Director Beth Whitaker and Special Collections Curator Elspeth Healey for a while. Maybe I met them at the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section (RBMS) conference in Las Vegas in 2014? I learned about Spencer through Beth and Elspeth, but really got to know Spencer when I visited several years ago on a day trip from the Linda Hall Library. Of course, the outstanding collection and staff were well-known to me. I wanted to return to focus on the material, and the faculty position here was the right fit at the right time with the right people.

What does your job at Spencer entail?

I am responsible (along with my colleagues in processing) for the description of printed items acquired by or added to the Spencer collections. In my time here already, I’ve cataloged a number of modern paperback science fiction books from the collection of William F. Wu, some bound manuscripts, and some new acquisitions. My bread and butter are early modern books that I catalog with Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Materials (Books) – or DCRM(B) – but I am branching out (and dusting off my Resource Description and Access (RDA) cobwebs) with the help of my colleagues.

How did you come to work in libraries/archives/special collections?

I started my post-college working life teaching history to high school students in north Dallas, which I discovered was not for me. I really wanted a career that would allow me to learn and be curious as a part of my work, and librarianship really seemed the best fit. My introduction to rare books began at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art and was cemented at Crystal Bridges, where I worked to catalog Bill Reese’s American color plate book collection. I came to bibliography later in my career, when my former colleague Jamie Cumby taught me the fundamentals of collation.

What part of your job do you like best?

Conceptually I like the professional norms we have around access, privacy, and our broad commitment to, well, sharing. Special collections libraries take things that are expensive and precious and make them accessible and (almost) free.

On the micro level, using bibliographical and other tools to help folks learn more about the physical aspects of the items in Spencer’s collections and either use those descriptions in their own work or decide to come and use the item in person.

I also really enjoy writing. There’s some great stuff in the works for publication, and I am so pleased that I can do that as a normal part of my job.

What do you have on your desk?

There are some things I keep at my desk I feel like are worthy of sharing here. First, this broadside printed at Firefly Press – an adaptation of Beatrice Warde’s famous lines about a printing office.

I also have this retablo of St. Jerome at my desk. A retablo is a two dimensional image of a saint painted by a santero, a maker of this uniquely New Mexican form of folk art. My friend Dr. Charles M. Carrillo made this image of Saint Jerome (a patron saint of librarians and archivists) to watch over me while I work, which he does!

I also keep a book snake on my desk that’s been with me for 15 years. One of my colleagues at the Carter, Maryjane Harbison, made this book snake for me. It’s here with mementos from other workplaces and such: a piece of the Kimbell’s travertine, the box “original staff” at Crystal Bridges were given at opening, and medallions from the Linda Hall Library and Southwestern University.

What is one of the most interesting items you’ve come across in Spencer’s collections?

Below is the title page of the Spencer copy of Newton’s Principia Mathematica, which was a focus of some of my scholarship a few years ago. When I look closely at the book, two things are interesting to me: it has the “two line” imprint statement on the title page, not mentioning a distributor, which is the first state of the title page, and uncancelled.

There’s another item which tells us more about this copy: the diagram on page 112 is printed upside down. Other copies of the book have this corrected with a cancel leaf. We can surmise that the Spencer copy is perhaps an early state of the S issue of the book, especially given the rarity of the uncancelled page 112, as noted by Henry Macomber in his census!

What are some of your favorite pastimes outside of work?

As I mentioned above, I collect art (and books, but isn’t that cliché?) – specifically the santero art I talked about, but also katsinas and photography. Photography is my hobby; my grandfather taught me photography as a teenager and it’s a passion we share with my youngest brother.

My reading interests are varied, but there are three mystery series I adore: Tony and Anne Hillerman’s Chee and Leaphorn novels, the Inspector Montalbano books by Andrea Camilleri, and the Bernie Gunter books by Philip Kerr.

I adore classical music, specifically of Bach and Philip Glass. I also serve on the board of Summerfest, so classical music is one of my favorite things.

I also do some very informal bookish writing with my good friend Rhiannon Knol. We write a bibliography and books focused newsletter called Half Sheets to the Wind.

Jason W. Dean
Rare Materials Cataloging Librarian

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

This post was written Public Services student assistant Kit Cavazos as part of their summer internship supervised by KU English Professor Misty Schieberle and Special Collections Curator Eve Wolynes.

Although medieval manuscripts are well-known for their look and style, the act of actually reading and understanding one can be tough. The image that often comes to mind is that of their non-naturalistic drawings, and thus, a casual viewer may see the squiggles sprinkled across the text as another odd decoration. However, many serve specific and intentional functions, acting as contractions, substitutions, or abbreviations of words or parts of words. Scribes often chose this practice because it saved on ink and parchment space, since both these materials were quite expensive.

The first and most prominent thing to note about manuscript notation is the dashes that are most often placed over vowels. Most of the time, these indicate a missing letter N or M. For example, “terram” shortens to “terrā.” The page above has quite a few examples in the first line: “qua[m],” “lapide[m],” and “lapide[m].”

Dashes can often have other meanings when interacting with a consonant, either by hovering above or crossing the letter. The incipit line of the above page has a quite recognizable first word, which substitutes an I for a J. This letter difference is generally because Latin, as a language, does not use the letter J, meaning our first word is “Judea.” Thus it is easier to understand part of the next noun, which has a letter L with a dash intersecting it, with the result resembling a stylized letter T. Picking out when a letter is a T or an L is made easy by way of comparison, as the page’s script will always have a style that differentiates letter that could be confused.

Thus, this L with an intersecting dash in the spine could represent a few similar letter clumps: “ler…,” “…ul,” “lor…,” or “al…,” among others. Despite knowing exactly what variations the letter could stand for, it still introduces a new wrinkle into the fold, as none of the suggested meanings for the substitutions seem to make the word wholly understandable. “Jerlerm,” “Jerulm,” “Jerlorm,” and “Jeralm” are not proper words, and thus, the contraction demonstrates how common words (such as proper nouns) could have more of an abstract contraction. When examining this word in context, it might be a bit easier to understand that this contraction represents the city named “Jerusalem.”

Another common symbol is this: , which often represents a “rum,” “ram,  or “rem” sort of ending. The above example has multiple instances of its use within the first line, all taking the first possible ending. The line, when uncontracted, would read “verbi salutaris ac miraculorum suorum dulcidine” (“by the sweetness of his saving word and miracles”). These textual changes – both contractions and substitutions – indicate that both scribes and readers needed to have not only a deep understanding of what each symbol represented, but also a sense of the language. You could either look at the Latin and parse some words, or you could understand how to complete the words but have their meaning completely lost on you. This afforded the literate members of the population some form of exclusivity from everyone else. These manuscripts often contain important information about plants, animals, or other general encyclopedic knowledge.

Another important aspect of a manuscript is additions that enhance a reader’s understanding of the text. The most obvious would be the fingers pointing to specific lines. These are manicules, and they are meant to emphasize important parts of the text. Another detail does something similar on the above page. The red lines highlighting specific letters are forms of rubrication, and they have a very similar function to manicules. In this instance, they mean to indicate and emphasize the capital letters in the line.

In other instances, rubrication notates significant parts of the text and frequently has a moralizing meaning. This means it can also come in textual form – often called the rubric – and it can add, emphasize, or reiterate important information to the reader. The term rubrication comes from the Latin word “ruber” (“red”), but important elements to a manuscript are not restricted solely to one color. Red often sees the most use, but blue and occasionally green can also be used for emphasis or decoration.

With these basic understandings of common aspects of a medieval text (at least within the Spencer collection), reading a manuscript for the first time may be less daunting. The above page, for example, has several features already discussed. Most prominently, the rubrication stands out from the rest of the content, especially in the rubricated initial letters A and I, which have blue decoration that appears to mimic a lace design. The first rubricated word of the text is in the incipit line, which has the same L with an intersecting dash as before. Thus, we know the word would be something like “pp[ul]m” or something similar. If you don’t have a book on contractions easily to hand, sometimes sounding out what letters you do have can help make sense of the word – “populum,” in this instance. Thus, reading through the incipit line, it would say something like “Absol[v]e q[uaesumu]s D[omine] p[o]p[u]l[um] n[ostr]o[rum] vincula peccato[rum]” (“we beseech you, O Lord, to absolve our people from the bonds of their sins”). From even just this first line, we can understand that the reader is meant to focus on the people or population about whom it is speaking.

Reading through a medieval text can be difficult; even just reading one line without translation can take hours, depending on how many contractions or abbreviations there are, as well as how obscure each one may be. The result, though, is quite often rewarding, as it means modern readers can understand how information was relayed and what information medieval writers saw as needing to be relayed. An online resource for information on specific abbreviations is Cappelli’s Latin Abbreviations, which has been incredibly helpful for research and compiling the transcription of these lines.

Kit Cavazos
Public Services student assistant