Kenneth Spencer Research Library

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.

In 2016, Kenneth Spencer Research Library received a large donation of about a thousand left-wing, radical zines from the Lawrence-based Solidarity Revolutionary Center Library. The books remaining in the library are now housed at the Ecumenical Campus Ministries building near campus. Before they were donated to Spencer, many of these zines were scanned and made available on the Internet Archive.

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.

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!

Kate Stewart
Curator of the Wilcox Collection of Contemporary Political Movements

Maureen Tuohey and Theo McKay
Public Services Student Assistants

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.

Caitlin Klepper
Head of Public Services

Wishing you and yours a very merry holiday season!

Spencer Research Library will be closed from December 23rd through January 1st and will reopen on January 2nd. We look forward to seeing you in 2024 and sharing more stories about our collections, staff, and services.

Visit the KU Libraries website for more information on winter recess across the libraries, including hours and options for accessing to online resources services available when buildings are closed.

Caitlin Klepper
Head of Public Services

Happy Halloween all you screechers, screamers, and hollerers! We’ve also been celebrating over here at Kenneth Spencer Research Library in the best we know how: combing the KU Libraries online catalog and finding what cursed history we can find. We asked our student workers to recommend their picks for items that best represent the spirit of Halloween. They went beyond the safety of the Reading Room and braved the stacks to bring us these unsettling tomes and relics, but not everything is what it seems. Here are a few of our favorites!

Our very first recommendation comes from the Centron Corporation, a film production company founded right here in Lawrence, Kansas. Perhaps best known for their work in educational films, the company also had a hand in the cult classic horror film Carnival of Souls. Elly Masteller found this lovely portrait in the Centron Corporation records collection. This cheerful gentleman was used in a film to help encourage literacy and creative writing among children. Remember kids, he can’t get you if your nose is in a book!

Kathryn Sauder sent in our next recommendation, another artifact, but this time from the Thomas Woodson Poor papers. Poor was an Olympic high jumper who competed for the University of Kansas from 1921 to 1925 and placed fourth in the high jump at the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris, France. Poor is also known for his lifelong crusade in helping children receive the polio vaccine after the tragic death of his daughter, Melinda Sue, from polio. One of the toys he used to do so was this monkey puppet, and while the puppet may look demonic, it helped save lives! Absolutely heartwarming, not chilling, but perhaps maybe do not look into its eyes for too long.

Literary giant Samuel Taylor Coleridge brings us our next spooky item, recommended by Nile Russo: a copy of The Devil’s Walk, or alternatively titled The Devil’s Thoughts. The Devil cuts a dapper shape as he gets himself dressed in his Sunday’s best for a walk around the town. In this poem, the Devil offers commentary about passersby, questioning perhaps if mankind might be the scariest creature of all.

Molly Leonard recommended perhaps the most soul-wrenching item among our recommendations this year: a copy of Historie des diables de Loudun. This is a book about the Loudun possessions, a piece of history about an Ursuline convent being taken over by unusual behavior and visions attributed to demonic possession. In the end, through the intervention of Cardinal Richelieu, a local priest and decrier of Richelieu’s policies named Urbain Grandier was tried and executed for witchcraft in connection with the possessions. Again, and we can’t reiterate this enough, mankind might just be the scariest monster of all.

And finally, Ian Strasma reminds us that Halloween isn’t only about creepy clowns, puppets and possessions, and dashingly dressed demons with this recommendation: a black cat found lurking in the Ronald Johnson collection (literary estate papers). The cat may be cute, but be careful that you do not cross him!

Best of luck out there as you begin finishing up semester and don’t be afraid to check out the many – completely safe, we promise – collections here at Kenneth Spencer Research Library!

Charissa Pincock
Processing Archivist

Spencer’s current exhibit is free and open to the public in the Exhibit Space through December 22nd. An online version of the exhibit is also available.

I’ve had the joy of working very closely with David Bergeron, Emeritus Professor of English, for several months as we prepare To the Great Variety of Readers: Celebrating the 400th Anniversary of Shakespeare’s First Folio, the first exhibit piloting the David M. Bergeron and Geraldo Sousa Exhibit initiative.

David and I had already been in conversation about exhibits as he and Geraldo developed their generous gift to support faculty research grounded in our collections. This project is very exciting to me, because I believe that exhibits are one of the best ways we can tell the stories of why libraries like this are important for a research university. We had bold ambitions to launch a call for proposals and a timeline, and then, as things happen, we encountered staff departures and a dean departure and all manner of other “reasons” progress was not made.

Luckily for all of us, David is a patient man. He approached me one morning and asked if the library had considered that this fall marked the 400th anniversary of the Shakespeare first folio. To be honest, I was unaware. We were still figuring out when we would have large scale exhibits, coming back from lockdown. The only fixed point on our exhibit schedule at that point was Fall of 2024, when we planned around the exciting centennial of the OTHER gorgeous library on campus, Watson. With David’s inspiration, we had the opportunity not only to work on an exhibit about this important milestone anniversary, but to test-drive collaborative exhibit processes prior to our launch of this program.

It has been a long time since I worked on a large-scale exhibit in Spencer’s exhibit space: 2018 to be exact, the magnificently fun 50 for 50. In the meantime, my colleagues have done a tremendous job of improving our exhibit processes. For those who don’t know, exhibit design is not as easy as picking which of our marvelous collections to put in a case. That’s the fun part. But it’s not all glamour, and I’d be happy to talk with anyone who wants to nerd out about digital file naming conventions and permissions to use images from other libraries and the perfect balance between font size for readability and size in the cases.

David and Geraldo’s gift is designed to encourage KU faculty to research in, and create exhibits from, the collections at Spencer Library. David isn’t the typical KU faculty member. For one thing, he’s a prolific author who uses our collections, and those of similar libraries, intensively in his research. For another, he’s continued this level of scholarly productivity into his retirement. So he has a lot of great ideas, and a lot of time on his hands, which is an exciting and terrifying combination. As I laid out the basic timeline of exhibit preparation from our end, he did not bat an eye.

We met roughly every other week to talk about the exhibit. He came up with a list of items very quickly, and not surprisingly, we couldn’t include it all. Spencer holds copies of thousands of significant literary works, but despite what you may hear from student guides on campus, KU Libraries does NOT hold a complete copy of the First Folio. While our friends at the Folger Shakespeare Library were open to lending us one of their many copies, they are closed for renovation.

But David has been gracious about our limitations, and very patient with me as I encouraged him to keep a lay reader in mind. We believe Shakespeare should be accessible to everyone, and so should Spencer Library’s exhibits.

We also had fun planning an event, complete with the excuse I never knew I wanted to order cardboard Shakespeare standees. And finally, stay tuned as we develop more collaborative exhibits with KU faculty. The lessons we learned working with David on this project will make future exhibits easier for the recipients of David and Geraldo’s generosity.

Beth M. Whittaker
Associate Dean for Distinctive Collections
Director of Spencer Research Library