Welcome to the Kenneth Spencer Research Library blog! As the special collections and archives library at the University of Kansas, Spencer is home to remarkable and diverse collections of rare and unique items. Explore the blog to learn about the work we do and the materials we collect.
Zines are self-published writing and art, often made by collage with illustration, photos, and clippings from other publications, and printed like a pamphlet or small book. Zine production began the 1930s with sci-fi fanzines, but in the 1980s and ‘90s, the widespread availability of the copy machine and Kinko’s 24-hour stores spurred many disaffected young people to express their personal and political opinions, often anonymously, in zines that were distributed locally and nationally via word of mouth and the postal service. Although the internet later replaced much of the ways young people previously communicated with each other, zine production has continued and has been made easier with new digital tools and home printers.
Front cover of Let’s Not Chase Our Tails: Workers, Get Organized! by Tricia Robinson, circa 2025. Call Number: Uncataloged. Click image to enlarge.
Front cover of I Strongly Recommend the Library, circa 2025. Call Number: Uncataloged. Click image to enlarge.
Front cover of Palestine, Mon Amour by Alfredo M. Bonnano, circa 2025. Call Number: Uncataloged. Click image to enlarge.
Since adding the Solidarity Library zines to the Wilcox Collection of Contemporary Political Movements in 2016, interest in the collection has grown among KU students, KU faculty, and community members. Several classes come to Spencer each semester to learn about the collection, view a selection of zines, and complete a primary source analysis activity with one zine. These class visits help prepare students to tackle a creative, unique assignment to make their own zines. Students also tour the Makerspace at Anschutz Library, where they can utilize the tools and materials needed to write, illustrate, assemble, and print copies of their zines for classes and/or for fun. Additionally, Spencer also hosted attendees of Lawrence’s annual Paper Plains Zine Festival last September for a tour of the library and to view some of our zines up close. Library staff were thrilled to see this group of zine creators and collectors show so much excitement and joy for our zine collection.
Front cover of How to Be a Happy Nihilist by Wendy Syfret, circa 2025. Call Number: Uncataloged. Click image to enlarge.
Front cover of Unmediated Reality: An Invitation Towards Intensity, circa 2025. Call Number: Uncataloged. Click image to enlarge.
Front cover of None of This is Normal, circa 2025. Call Number: Uncataloged. Click image to enlarge.
Due to the popularity of the zine collection, it seemed like a good idea to acquire more recently published zines that address current topics students might be interested in. Last fall, we purchased about a hundred new zines (many of them created in 2025 and purchased on Etsy). While some of the zines are reprints of older publications, the more recent ones address topics such as political attacks on transgender people, resistance to fascism and state violence, the labor movement, the war in Gaza, the American tech oligarchy, artificial intelligence, the COVID-19 pandemic, and mutual aid. The zines are in the process of being cataloged; when that work is completed, information about them will be available via the KU Libraries online catalog, and the zines themselves will be available for classes and for research in our Reading Room.
Throughout this post is a sample of ten covers from our most recent purchase of zines. If you have suggestions for further purchases or donations of zines for the Wilcox Collection or if you would like to view these in our reading room, get in touch with Spencer staff!
Front cover of Maneater: The Monstrous Feminine, circa 2025. Call Number: Uncataloged. Click image to enlarge.
Front cover of the zine Anarchist Survival Guide for Understanding Gestapo Swine Interrogation Mind Games by Harold H. Thompson, circa 2025. Call Number: Uncataloged. Click image to enlarge.
Front cover of How to Survive the Fall of Democracy with Joy and Whimsy in Your Heart, circa 2025. Call Number: Uncataloged. Click image to enlarge.
Front cover of the zine Fight Fascism: How to Recognize It and Take Action, circa 2025. Call Number: Uncataloged. Click image to enlarge.
Kate Stewart Curator of the Wilcox Collection of Contemporary Political Movements
Maureen Tuohey and Theo McKay Public Services Student Assistants
Charlton Hinman was a looker. Of course, that was true of so many of Fredson Bowers’ students – they tended to be lookers. We won’t make any comment on the relative attractiveness of Charlton Joseph Kadio Hinman or Bowers’ students, but we refer instead to the tradition of close examination and description of books that Bowers codified and Hinman continued here at the University of Kansas. On the north side of the Marilyn Stokstad Reading Room at Kenneth Spencer Research Library is the Hinman Collator, a hulking grey machine that stands as a reminder of (and a tool for) precisely that kind of work. Our colleague Caitlin Klepper wrote a post about the collator previously, but we thought we might delve more in-depth here.
Professor Charlton Hinman working at the Hinman Collator, circa 1960-1975. University Archives Photos. Call Number: RG 41/ Faculty and Staff: Hinman, Charlton (Photos). Click image to enlarge (redirect to Spencer’s digital collections).
Modern descriptive bibliography – the close physical examination and description of books – begins with Fredson Bowers’ book Principles of Bibliographical Description (1949). Bowers was a professor of English at the University of Virginia, and Charlton Hinman was Bowers’ first PhD student there. Both Hinman and Bowers had analytical minds with similar bents, which served them well in the Second World War. They were involved in cryptography and code breaking, with Bowers again leading Hinman as his commanding officer. Following their service, Bowers returned to Virginia, publishing the aforementioned Principles.
Fredson Bowers supervises a student with the Hinman Collator, undated. Image courtesy of Special Collections, University of Virginia Library. University of Virginia Visual History Collection. Call Number: RG-30/1/10.011. Click image to enlarge (redirect to UVA’s digital collections).
Hinman’s dissertation, The Printing of the First Quarto of Othello, led to his first position as a research fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library, where he collated copies of the first folio of Othello. It was Hinman’s time as a fellow at the Folger that inspired his creation of the collation machine. Collation – or, the work of examining and describing the physical evidence in a copy of a book – is time consuming. Hinman’s work was even more intensive, as he sought to find all of the different states of the pages down to the most minor corrections or insertions made by the printer in the course of printing the book. Looking at each page of text line by line is an almost impossible task. Hinman hints at this problem in his preliminary essay about the machine, which was titled “Mechanized Collation: A Preliminary Report” and printed in the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America in 1947.
Charlton Hinman working at his desk (with the collator behind him), circa 1960-1975. University Archives Photos. Call Number: RG 41/ Faculty and Staff: Hinman, Charlton (Photos). Click image to enlarge (redirect to Spencer’s digital collections).
Hinman’s time in the military helped point the way to a solution, supposedly through military reconnaissance use of photography. He described the idea of taking two pictures of the same area and rapidly alternating them to spot differences. He didn’t claim he had done it as part of his cryptography work; rather, he claimed he heard about it while in the military. However, the process Hinman described was never used for reconnaissance purposes. While the military did use aerial photography, they didn’t use any method that alternated two images in a similar way to the function of the Collator. In his article “‘The Eternal Verities Verified’: Charlton Hinman and the Roots of Mechanical Collation” (Studies in Bibliography, 2000), Steven Escar Smith writes that “using World War II technology, it simply would not have been possible to photograph the same patch of ground twice from exactly the same altitude and position.” According to Smith, Hinman seems to have acknowledged that the story wasn’t entirely true, but it’s not clear whether he actually discouraged its telling.
Arthur M. Johnson, Hinman’s partner who took over building and selling collators around 1956, may have been the one to accurately describe how Hinman got the idea for the collator. Johnson wrote that Hinman had studied something that Johnson called an “astronomer’s microscope.” It used the same principle of “blink comparison” to compare images of the night sky, most famously by Kansan (and KU alumnus) Clyde W. Tombaugh in his observation of Pluto. Although it’s not known whether Hinman ever saw or used a blink comparator, he knew of the one at the observatory at UVA when he was a PhD student there. This was the true technological ancestor of Hinman’s machine.
Clyde W. Tombaugh at a blink comparator, undated. Image courtesy of New Mexico State University Library Archives and Special Collections, Clyde W. Tombaugh papers, image 04070052. Click image to enlarge.
These kinds of devices are simpler than the Hinman Collator in that one can use flat images of similar size – not possible with books. Hinman’s great improvement and contribution, then, was the creation of a machine that could deal with books of different sizes, thicknesses, and even formats. Hinman had a long career as a professor of English, first at Johns Hopkins University (1945-1960) and then at the University of Kansas (1960-1975), where he eventually became a University Distinguished Professor of English. Approximately 50 collators survive. The collator at Spencer (A9 in Steven Escar Smith’s 2002 census of existing Hinman Collators, published in Studies in Bibliography) is one of two that remain that Hinman himself used; the other is at the Folger Library. The effect of the collator is reproduced in this short video by Sam Lemley. Bibliographer J.P. Ascher has also made a good video about how one might use the collator, utilizing the machine at the University of Virginia.
Hoping to actually use Spencer’s machine, we ventured to the Reading Room before opening. We powered it on, and, to our delight, the 400-pound machine came to life. Unfortunately, this was not to be, as we discovered that the “blink” feature, the key function, is not currently working. Thanks to the efforts of our colleague Molly Bauer, we are slowly learning what might be wrong and what the fix might be. Look for a follow-up post in the spring about our efforts, as well as digital alternatives to optical collation that bibliographers can use today.
Wiring inside the Hinman Collator at Spencer Research Library. Click image to enlarge.
The Hinman Collator, for now, stands as a testament to the ongoing work of descriptive an analytical bibliography here at the University of Kansas. Much like its creator, the machine is complicated and devoted to a very specific purpose – close looking at material objects we regularly take for granted.
Jason W. Dean and Adrienne Sanders Rare Materials Cataloging Librarians
Lawrencians securing a Christmas tree to the top of their car, November 25, 1984. Lawrence Journal-World Photograph Collection. Call number: RH PH LJW. Click image to enlarge (redirect to Spencer’s digital collections).
Spencer Research Library will be closed from December 22nd through January 2nd and will reopen on January 5th. We look forward to seeing you in 2026 and sharing more stories about our collections, staff, and services.
Visit the KU Libraries website for more information on winter recess across the libraries.
James Coffin’s postcard from Jefferson Barracks, Missouri. James and Fern Nelson-Coffin Collection. Call Number: RH MS 1501. Click image to enlarge.
James Coffin’s postcard to Fern Nelson from Salt Lake City, September 1942. “I’m on my way again,” he writes, “destination undisclosed.” James and Fern Nelson-Coffin Collection. Call Number: RH MS 1501. Click image to enlarge.
The 99th BG trained with B-17s and moved initially to North Africa, assigned to the Twelfth Air Force. From there, strategic bombing missions were carried out against targets in Tunisia, Sardinia, Sicily, and Italy. By December 1943, the 99th was transferred to the Fifteenth Air Force station in Italy, where they remained until the end of the war.
For the most part, Jimmie Coffin’s letters at Spencer were addressed to his future wife, Fern Berniece Nelson (1914-2018), with a few letters from Fern to Jimmie preserved in the collection as well. His letters from the front lines focus on the personal rather than the military actions going on. Censorship prohibited writing about missions – not even mentions of the weather were permitted. He writes about what he’s fed, new movies he’s had the chance to see, and responses to the many inquiries of her letters. But most importantly, he repeats how much he misses her and misses home.
A tender and heartfelt letter from Fern to Jimmie, dated Christmas Eve, 1943. James and Fern Nelson-Coffin Collection. Call Number: RH MS 1501. Click image to enlarge.
As the war progressed, Jimmie’s letters moved from the North African Theater of Operations for the U. S. Army (NATOUSA) to Italy. The collection of letters ends in 1945 with the conclusion of the war. Coffin stayed in the service for several years thereafter, receiving his discharge in 1952 as a Technical Sergeant (T/SGT). After leaving the service, he led a career as a pharmacist.
The James and Fern Nelson Coffin collection (Call Number: RH MS 1501) offers a powerful, intimate window of the human experience of war. The letters show the enduring power of love and the pain of separation. They serve as a poignant reminder of the lifelines of family and home amidst global conflict. This collection is but one example of countless stories, both documented and untold, that bridged the long distances of the home front and front lines. May their words ensure the hopes and dreams of reunion not be forgotten.
Last month, the J. Wayne and Elsie M. Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction hosted the fourth annual Sturgeon Symposium, “Expanding Speculative Horizons,” to showcase contemporary speculative fiction scholarship and writing and to present the Theodore Sturgeon Award. I was able to attend the first day of the Symposium and began thinking about the relationship between the Kenneth Spencer Research Library and the speculative fiction community.
KSRL holds a variety of speculative fiction collections in Special Collections, and my colleagues in the manuscripts processing department have had the joy of working on these collections. I’ve chosen a small slice of this material—four of Spencer’s collections—to spotlight here to the variety that exits in speculative fiction.
Theodore Sturgeon (MS 303, MS 254), the namesake of the Symposium and Award, was a speculative writer who wrote ten novels, including More than Human (1953), but is perhaps best remembered for his many short stories. Sturgeon’s speculative fiction often explored social issues and pushed back on societal norms; his 1953 short story “The World Well Lost” won the Gaylactic Spectrum “Hall of Fame” award in 2000, for example. Sturgeon’s writings covered a variety of genres, and several other speculative fiction creatives can be found in this collection, including Octavia Butler; Ray Bradbury; Judith Merril; Roy Thomas, a Marvel Comics editor and author; and Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, to name a few.
Theodore Sturgeon’s typewriter. Papers of Theodore Sturgeon. Call #: MS 359, box 2
Mary Rosenblum (MS 362) was a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon award in 1998 with “The Good Juror,” a story she co-authored with James Sarafin, and was also a finalist for the Nebula Award in 2008 for her novelette “Night Wind.”[1] But what interested me about the Rosenblum collection was how Rosenblum explored speculative fiction horizons through an environmental lens. In her novel Drylands, Rosenblum wrote about the dangers of climate change and the exploitation of resources in a post-apocalyptic setting. While speculative fiction is no stranger to exploring alternate histories and cautionary futures, Rosenblum’s Drylands was one I had never heard of before. It had been a Locus First Novel Award nominee, and I was pleasantly surprised to find her collection while researching KSRL’s speculative fiction holdings.
Opening page of “Second Chance” by Mary Rosenblum, annotated with editorial and copyediting marks. Mary Rosenblum papers, Call #: MS 362, Box 2, Folder 19.
Spencer Library doesn’t just have speculative fiction writers; much of Terry Lee’s original speculative fiction artwork can also be found here (MS 391). Lee is a KU graduate and a former font designer for Hallmark. He won a Chesley Award in 1988 for his cover artwork for the January 1987 issue of Amazing Stories.
Acrylic painting by Terry Lee for “Aymara” by Lucius Shepard, which served as the cover illustration for the August 1986 issue of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. Terry Lee papers. Call #: MS Qa 56, Box 1, Folder 5.
Finally, Spencer holds the papers of William F. Wu (MS 367). Wu is a speculative fiction writer whose works have been published in Amazing Stories, Analog, and Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, amongst others, and has been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Hugo awards. Wu’s academic interest in Asian American representation in popular culture led to him writing The Yellow Peril: Chinese Americans in American Fiction, 1850-1940 (1982), which had its origins as his doctoral dissertation. From convention materials to correspondence to comic books, William Wu’s collection provides researchers with a wealth of speculative fiction materials.
Outline (left) and draft for Perihelion (right) by William F. Wu, the sixth book in the Isaac Asimov’s Robot City (1988). Asimov’s introduction for the volume appears at the top of the draft. William F. Wu papers. Call # MS 367, Box 13, Folders 12 and 13.
Speculative fiction continues to be an ever-evolving field of literature, with new and exciting visions and interpretations of reality arriving each year. I’m already excited for next year’s Sturgeon Symposium and Theodore Sturgeon Award presentation. But in the meantime, there’s still other speculative fiction horizons to explore at Spencer Research Library!
Want to explore further? Check out these other speculative fiction collections:
Kij Johnson papers, MS 377, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas.
John Kessel papers, MS 358, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas.
Round Robin collection, MS P769, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas.
A. E. van Vogt Collection, MS 322, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas.
Molly Bauer Manuscripts Processor
[1] The winner of the 2008 Nebula Award in the novelette category was another writer whose papers reside at Spencer Research Library, John Kessel. He won for his novelette “Pride and Prometheus.”
