Kenneth Spencer Research Library

One of the most fascinating things about medieval manuscripts is that every copy is unique and individual. Because scribes wrote manuscripts by hand, no two copies are identical. On March 8th, Kenneth Spencer Research Library opened Marvelous Medieval Marginalia, an exhibit that celebrates the unique and the individual, the best parts of medieval manuscripts, and the scribes, readers, and owners who had a hand in transforming texts over time. It’s dedicated to the voices of not necessarily the great and influential authors and artists of old but to a quieter subset who aren’t always given the attention they deserve – the readers, the imaginers, and doodlers across centuries.

The exhibit focuses on marginalia. From the Latin for literally just “things in the margins,” marginalia can encompass many things, from formally executed illustrations meant to enhance the manuscript into a work of art to notes and annotations. We tend to think of books as static or frozen in time, but through marginalia and readers, they were often amorphous and ever-changing, shaped and reshaped by their owners over decades and centuries. Medieval readers were not merely passive consumers of manuscripts; they thought about and engaged with their texts, argued and agreed, and added their thoughts. And their relics are preserved in the notes they left behind, capturing their fleeting thoughts in amber for us to enjoy centuries later.

With annotations, we can see what people actually thought about the texts they read. They let us see where readers denied or disagreed with the original manuscript – as with this manuscript copy of Lactantius’ Divine Institutes, a defense of Christianity and a refutation of Greek and Roman polytheism.

An early reader has added the note “falsum” or “false” while striking lines through parts of the text – potentially either disagreeing with the text itself or perhaps claiming it was spurious and misattributed. Where readers’ notes give us insight into the sometimes-critical thoughts of medieval readers, their doodles provide glimpses into the universal experience of boredom and the creativity it can allow to blossom. With doodles, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” We doodle just as much today as people did 800 years ago, but what we doodle changes, reflecting the nuances of human culture and identity. It’s a time-honored tradition across the centuries; you’ve likely stuck at least a few notes in the margins of your class assignments or books over the years. Idle doodles encapsulate the wandering thoughts of people from the past as they were when they took quill pen to page.

Sometimes, it was the scribes themselves, the people writing and copying the manuscripts for later audiences, who added flares of fun into the margins. Copying manuscripts by hand was often a long and tedious process, taking anywhere from days to months. A certain playfulness to these marginalia emerged when the scribe’s mind and hand wandered. You wind up with texts like MS B15, a collection of Divine Offices, hymns, prayers, and devotional poetry, where the scribe has very diligently copied the text for over 700 pages, all written in the same hand so that you know this is one person scribbling page after page after page. But they’ve broken the tedium by dappling the tops and bottoms of letters with -Picasso-esque caricatures, skewed profile faces wearing silly hats, and the occasional peacock.

Marginalia can help reveal the silent reader’s voice and how they understood or analyzed texts – but even in the case of drawings and doodles, these weren’t all the product of an idle mind. Often, the doodles in the margins directly responded to and sometimes commented upon the text itself, creating visual commentary that shows how a scribe or reader responded to the work. These are called deliberate or communicative doodles.

Marginalia didn’t end with the advent of print, but they were unquestionably changed by it. In many ways, printing is more rigid than writing a manuscript. You work with a metal frame that limits where letters can fit, the shape of the page and its structure, and all the letters are predetermined shapes carved into small metal pieces that you then reorganize into different words. That rigidity, of course, meant that it was much easier to make literal copies of the text, nearly identical to one another.

While print stole some of the freedom and flexibility of the page and written word, readers continued to imbue their books with their agency and interpretations, even with the radical technological shift. One reader of Agostino Nifo’s A Small Commentary on the Most Accurate Signs of Weather has bestowed nearly every page with minute illustrations connected to the text, highlighting the vibrancy of weather with sketches of animals associated with certain types of weather alongside copious notes, including a doodle of a bat next to Nifo’s claim that when bats fly in a great flock in the evening, it promises a calm, serene night.

Manuscripts reflect the medieval mind. Through marginalia, we can see how they organized their thoughts and how they reacted and responded to text and information.  In the same way, when you visit an exhibit, you bring your thoughts, experiences, and analyses to the books. As you go through it, you may pick and choose different parts of the exhibit that catch your eye and interest; you may find the exhibit text insightful (or boring!). My exhibit text will tell you what I think is important about materials, but those won’t be the same things that you find interesting or important. With this exhibit, open through July, I invite you to bring your own doodles to our margins – including the exhibit wall text! You’ll see the manuscripts mentioned above, with many more, that all embody the agency and choices of their readers over the centuries. We welcome you to read, think, and doodle about the exhibit (albeit preferably not in our manuscripts). Thank you for being a reader of our exhibits here at Kenneth Spencer Research Library.

Eve Wolynes
Special Collections Curator

This post was written by Tiffany McIntosh, who was Spencer’s Administrative Associate unit until last month. She is now the Outreach Manager at the Watkins Museum of History in downtown Lawrence.

This exhibit was developed over the last thirteen weeks as part of a final project for my master’s program in museum studies at the University of Oklahoma. To be able to graduate, I had the choice of doing a project, an internship, or a research paper. The choice of doing a project was fairly clear to me from the beginning. With guidance from an onsite supervisor, students were asked to find a museum (or similar institution) to work with to fill a need they had and to create a project that would further the student’s learning. Looking for some fun insights behind the process of curating an exhibit? Look no further!

How did the idea for this exhibit come about?

In order to graduate from my master’s program, I needed to do an independent project that I created in partnership with a cultural heritage institution. Having worked at Spencer, I felt it allowed me the opportunity to develop new skills in an environment I was already comfortable in. The project had to be outside our job scope which is why this was a great opportunity to learn new skills. Originally I was going to do an exhibit on a different topic, but my interest in the diaries in Spencer’s collections led me to the idea of Kansas in the 1800s. Knowing little about this topic, I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

What was the process of creating the exhibit?

Once I came up with the idea and my project was approved, I started planning the direction I wanted to take. I began by digging through the finding aids and pulling collections to look through. I dug through over 115 collections before I found the right items for my exhibit. With the help of my onsite supervisor, Kansas Collection Curator Phil Cunningham, I was able to pin down layouts for my cases. Once my items and layouts were settled on, I scanned everything for my Omeka exhibit and sent them off to the conservation lab for treatment. After that I started the process of writing my exhibit labels. Writing labels was probably the hardest part of this whole process. There’s only so much you can portray in 100-200 words. Once my labels were ironed out, it was all just waiting for installation day. As I waited for installation, I wrote this blog post, created an activity, and worked on my Omeka exhibit.

What was the most surprising thing you discovered?

I would say I was most surprised by how hard it was to find things about rural life in the 1800s. There were plenty of ledgers, bank books, diaries (sometimes in illegible handwriting), and other things. But, there was a limited number of exhibit-worthy items that would get people thinking and talking. Finding photographs was the hardest. Every time I found one that I liked I would realize it was from the early 1900s. I suppose could have included those photos in the exhibit, but I was determined to stick to my plan.

What is the most interesting thing you learned while working on this exhibit?

I was pretty amazed that collections that have never been looked at together are interconnected. Many items in my case on Lawrence relate to each other but come from different collections. For example, I had previously worked with the J. House business card from the Lawrence business cards collection, so finding the J. House receipt in the Bowersock collection was super cool to me. It was also fun putting things into perspective. The exhibit includes a Steinbergs’ Clothing House business card, and one of the images I found has Steinbergs’ storefront in it. This might not seem cool on the surface level. When looking at the original photo you can’t read the business names. It wasn’t until I scanned and blew up the photo that I realized it showed Steinbergs’. I could go on forever but those were two of my favorite findings.

What do you hope visitors take away from this exhibit?

I hope viewers walk away with an understanding of how surprisingly different lives can be lived in a relatively close area. The author of the anonymous farmer’s diary talks about going to Kansas City, and imagining what that may have been like compared to life on the farm is just really interesting to me. I also hope people see the parallels of life in the 1800s to now. While there have been many advancements, rural farmers are still secluded from city life in a way while Massachusetts Street in Lawrence is still booming with business.

At the end of the day, this project has been a blast. I never thought I would be creating a physical exhibit as part of my program, one curated entirely by me at that. I have learned so many skills and things about my thought process throughout this semester. Things like the ups and downs of writing labels, or thinking you found the perfect item only to find it is in poor condition, or you can’t read it, or it does not fit the time frame. I hope visitors are able to feel some connection when they walk away from the exhibit.

Tiffany McIntosh
Spencer Public Services/Watkins Museum of History

Today, Friday, November 1, 2024, is the fifth annual Ask a Conservator Day, an initiative of the American Institute for Conservation (AIC), the national professional organization for conservators.

Ask a Conservator Day serves a dual purpose. First, it commemorates the flooding of Florence on November 4, 1966, which damaged cultural heritage sites throughout that city and, in the aftermath of the disaster, sparked a massive recovery effort that is seen as the origin of the modern conservation profession. Ask a Conservator Day also serves as an opportunity for conservators and other preservation professionals to educate the public about the conservation profession.

In that spirit, I will revive our occasional Today in the Lab series to share a snapshot of what I am working on right now. The materials at my workbench always represent an ever-changing mixture of long-term projects and one-off treatments with a shorter turnaround time, and at any given time I will have items from all of Spencer’s collecting areas in my queue. So come along on a tour of my workspace!

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First, on the green book truck next to my bench I have a group of recently catalogued children’s books from Special Collections, mostly from the 19^th century. As my colleagues in cataloging complete their work on the records for these materials, they flag volumes that need repair or housing. Our team of Conservation Services student assistants have already made custom enclosures to protect these vulnerable books, and I have been working through the flagged items in batches to complete any needed repairs.

Next, I have several sets of architectural drawings for Watson Library, which is having its centennial this year. These sets are for the original 1922-1924 construction and a 1940’s addition, a total of 116 individual drawings. These drawings bear signs of being used on the construction site: edge tears and creases from frequent rolling and unrolling, builders’ markings in pencil and other media, and a significant accumulation of surface dirt. One by one I have been surface cleaning the drawings on both sides, flattening the creases, and mending the tears with a specially made repair tissue. Just 6 more drawings to go before these sets will be returned to the University Archives, where they will be available once again to researchers.

Moving on to my cabinet! Right now the upper section of my cabinet mostly holds materials that I have prepared for an upcoming temporary exhibit. I have made cradles or selected other supports from our supply of exhibit materials, and for now these items are simply waiting for the installation date. On the lower shelf, second from the right, is a very long-term treatment that is in progress, an early 20^th century funeral ledger from the Kansas Collection. I have removed duct tape from the spine of the volume and have mended about half of the text block. When mending is completed, I will reinforce the sewing and board attachments so that this fascinating volume will be stable enough for use in the reading room.

Finally, in two of my lower cabinet drawers I have items awaiting treatment that have come to me either from cataloging and processing, or from the reading room. These are typical of the single-item treatments that make up the bulk of my daily work: items needing custom enclosures, volumes with detached spines or boards, rolled material that needs to be flattened, photographs that need to be removed from frames. This steady stream of “patients” is what keeps my day-to-day work from becoming boring or repetitive, as the depth and variety of Spencer Library’s collections means that I always have something new-to-me to work on.

Angela Andres, special collections conservator

Spencer Research Library and the Gordon Parks Center have collaborated to create a pop-up display and small exhibition on the life, journey, and friendship of Gordon Parks and Langston Hughes.

The Gordon Parks Center in Fort Scott, with support from Humanities Kansas, curated an exhibition in 2023 exploring the connections between these two Kansas artistic luminaries and their local connections to the state.

This collaborative effort is inspired in part by a call by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) to highlight “African Americans and the Arts” in 2024. Working across collections and institutions, we have an opportunity to take a closer look at the varied histories and lives of African American artists.

Oftentimes, when we think of Black artistic movements, we often think of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s or the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. What is easy to overlook is the strong Kansas connection to both movements. Likewise, when we think of Kansas art and artists, it is easy to think of pastoral landscapes that capture the natural beauty of the prairie landscape and poetic descriptions of wildflowers and controlled burns. The linking of Kansas artists to these larger artistic movements that give rise to underrepresented voices in the world of arts and letters is not always so apparent. One of the most famous artists of the state is John Steuart Curry, the hand behind the Tragic Prelude mural painted in the rotunda of the capitol building in Topeka. But, did you know that another work by Curry, The Fugitive, was featured in an exhibition titled An Art Commentary on Lynching in 1935? Of the 38 artists whose work was included in the New York exhibition, Curry’s work was used on the cover of the exhibition catalog, designed to bring attention to the need for a nationwide anti-lynching law.

Two of the most recognized artists of the Harlem Renaissance and Black Arts Movement have roots in Kansas. This is no coincidence. Kansas in the early 20th century fostered a certain creative intelligence in these young men that would translate to and be understood by a large audience. Both Hughes and Parks grew up in working class families. Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, just across the state line from Baxter Springs, Kansas. Before his first birthday, he was living between Topeka and Lawrence. Locally, he attended Pinckney School and lived on Alabama Street in West Lawrence (now referred to as Old West Lawrence). He worked for a time as a newsie, selling the Saturday Evening Post and briefly the Appeal to Reason, a socialist newspaper published out of Girard, Kansas. He stopped delivering the Appeal after being told by the local editor of the former that the latter would get him into trouble. His introduction to the social issues discussed in the Appeal would shape a sense of solidarity with working class folks. Fifty miles away from Hughes’ birthplace is the childhood home of Gordon Parks, born in Fort Scott, Kansas, where his father was a tenant farmer. While Hughes was an only child, Parks was the youngest of fifteen.

Both Parks’ and Hughes’ earliest writings were inspired by memories of their Kansas childhoods and drew upon stories about people they knew. Hughes’ first novel, Not Without Laughter, is based on his upbringing in Lawrence. In his first autobiography, The Big Sea, he reflected on the ideas that would become Not Without Laughter. He wanted to write about a typical Black family in the Midwest and about people he had known in Kansas. Yet, he felt like his family and upbringing was not typical. “I gave myself aunts that I didn’t have, modeled after other children’s aunts whom I had known,” Hughes wrote. “But I put in a real cyclone that had blown my grandmother’s front porch away.”

Parks drew on his own childhood while writing his first novel, The Learning Tree. Though set in the fictional town of Cherokee Flats with fictional characters, it closely resembled Fort Scott. When Parks later directed a film based on the story, he shot it on location in Fort Scott.

Kansas was not without racial bigotry. Both Hughes and Parks talked openly about being the subject of ridicule and name-calling and feeling fearful of violence. Despite the unpleasant realities faced during their childhoods, Kansas remained an important part of their lives. In Half Past Autumn, a retrospective of Parks’ work, he calls the state his touchstone:

“I looked back to the heaven and hell of Kansas and asked some questions…My memories gave me some straight talk. The important thing is not so much what you suffered or didn’t suffer, but how you put that learning to use.”

“There had been infinitely beautiful things to celebrate – golden twilights, dawns, rivers aglow in sunlight, moons climbing over Poppa’s barns, orange autumns, trees bending under storms and silent snow. But marring the beauty was the graveyard where, even in death, whites lay rigidly from Blacks. Twenty-odd years had passed when, with these things lying in my memory, I returned to Kansas and went by horseback to lock them firmly with my camera. Spring was wrapped around the prairies. Nothing much has changed – certainly not the graveyard.”

Langston Hughes returned to visit Lawrence after many years as well. Later in life, he was invited to speak at the University of Kansas, which he had visited as a small child. During one of his return visits, Hughes donated a collection of personal books and manuscripts to KU Libraries.

Throughout this summer, Spencer Library will feature a panel-display exhibit from the Gordon Parks Center accompanied with archival materials from the Kansas Collection to tell the stories of Langston Hughes and Gordon Parks and show the impact of their time growing up in Kansas on their life and careers. Their cultural expression through visual art, performing arts, literature, films, and music preserves our history, retells our stories for the next generation, and inspires our futures.

The exhibition will be on display through August 16, 2024, in the reception area of Spencer Research Library. The library and exhibit are free and open to everyone. You can visit our website to plan your visit.

Phil Cunningham
Kansas Collection Curator

Conservators often say that what draws them to this work is the variety – every day is different! Always something new to learn! Never a dull moment! In my role as special collections conservator at KU Libraries, I am fortunate to work on interesting items from all of the collecting areas within the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, and my day-to-day experience bears out the truth of those clichés. Each book, document, and object I work with wears evidence of its own unique history. Physical condition, materials, marks or repairs made by persons past – sometimes these features tell a clear story about the life an object has lived, and sometimes the picture is murky, fragmented, or confusing. In the new short-term exhibit on view in Spencer Library’s North Gallery, I returned to the subject of a 2016 blog post to explore the ways that a book’s binding might provide information about who owned the book and how it was used.

Spencer Library’s three copies of Thomas Sprat’s A true account and declaration of the horrid conspiracy against the late king, His present Majesty, and the government: as it was order’d to be published by His late Majesty are displayed in the first exhibit case. This book relates Sprat’s official account, as Bishop of Rochester, of the failed 1683 Rye House Plot to assassinate King Charles II of England and his brother (and successor) James, Duke of York. The horrid conspiracy, as we’ll call it, was printed in London in 1685 by Thomas Newcombe, “One of His Majesties printers; and … sold by Sam. Lowndes over against Exeter-Change in the Strand.”

After leaving Lowndes’ shop these three edition-mates embarked on separate journeys, only to arrive back together again in our stacks over three hundred years later. The books’ differing conditions and binding styles invite speculation about their adventures (and misadventures!) in the intervening years. The exhibit compares the physical characteristics and evidence of use seen on the three volumes and considers what these features might tell us about who owned them and how they were used. We cannot know for sure, but it is so fun to wonder!

In case two, we expand our examination of different binding styles to include a small selection of bindings from Spencer Library’s rare books collections. The display includes books in original paper bindings or wrappers from the publisher, books custom-bound for private owners in either a plain or a fine style, and others bound simply and sturdily for use in a lending library. Spencer Library’s collections are rich with examples of bookbinding styles across the centuries; this assortment of volumes represents just a fraction of the many ways that a book might have been bound either by bookseller, buyer, or library.