Kenneth Spencer Research Library

Chosen as the 16^th Chancellor of the University of Kansas in 1995, Robert Hemenway passed away July 31 at the age of 73. During his years as Chancellor he focused on the improvement of the student experience, the achievement of a National Cancer Institute designation for the KU Cancer Center, and setting record-high fundraising levels that benefited both the University and the state of Kansas. Upon retirement in 2009, his legacy was honored by the establishment of the Dole Institute Robert Hemenway Award for Outstanding Public Service, and by the naming of the Robert E. Hemenway Life Sciences Innovation Center, a research facility on the KU Medical Center campus.

Chancellor Hemenway reading a story at Mayfest, Potter Lake, 1998.
Photograph by KU University Relations. University Archives Photos.
Call Number: RG 2/19 1998 Prints: Chancellors: Hemenway (Photos).
Click image to enlarge.

Zach Hemenway recalled his father’s passion for education saying, “He really instilled that in all of us—the value of learning and being curious and challenging yourself.” That passion made Hemenway a beloved Chancellor and colleague. Current Chancellor Bernadette Gray-Little issued a heartfelt message about the Chancellor who always preferred to be called “Bob.”

Throughout his tenure Chancellor Hemenway taught English and American Studies courses.
He is pictured as a guest speaker in “Feminist Theory in Anthropology.”
Photograph by KU University Relations. University Archives Photos.
Call Number: RG 2/19 2001 Prints: Chancellors: Hemenway (Photos).
Click image to enlarge.

You can learn much more about Chancellor Hemenway at Spencer Research Library. As the repository of the University’s official documents, University Archives houses the papers and correspondence of all KU chancellors. Please note that the records of the sitting chancellor as well as the preceding chancellor require permission from the Office of the Chancellor for access. Spencer is also home to Dr. Hemenway’s personal papers, which include administrative documents from previous posts at the University of Kentucky, the University of Wyoming, and the University of Oklahoma; research, teaching materials, and course notes on American literature, particularly African American literature; research related to his literary biography of Zora Neale Hurston, and his dissertation on Charles Brockden Brown.

JoJo Palko
KU 150 Research Archivist
University Archives

Calling all KU student book collectors:  it’s that magical season when your love of books can actually replenish your coffers rather than empty your pockets.  The competition for the 59th Annual Snyder Book Collecting Contest is now open, and entries are due by 5 p.m. Friday, March 27, 2015.  Collections need not be rare or expensive to win; rather you should be able to write thoughtfully about the scope and coherence of your collection, your purpose and method in building it, and how individual items fit within the larger whole.

Winners are selected in both graduate and undergraduate divisions, with the following cash awards:

• First Prize: $600
• Second Prize: $400
• Honorable Mention: $100

Each winner will also receive a gift card in the following amounts from contest co-sponsor Jayhawk Ink, a division of KU Bookstore:

• First Prize: $100
• Second Prize: $50
• Honorable Mention: $25

Need further incentive to enter?  Did you know that last year’s graduate division winner, Katya Soll, also won the National Collegiate Book Collecting Contest with her collection “Dictatorship, Recovery, and Innovation: Contemporary Theatre of the Southern Cone?”  The national prize earned her an additional $2,500, which was awarded at a ceremony at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.

National Champion: Katya Soll at the 2014 Snyder Book Collecting Contest with her 1st place Graduate Division collection, “Dictatorship, Recovery, and Innovation: Contemporary Theatre of the Southern Cone.” Images courtesy of KU Libraries; click images to enlarge.

KU’s contest is one of the longest-running collegiate book-collecting contests in the United States.  It was established by Elizabeth M. Snyder (then Elizabeth Taylor) in 1957 to cultivate and recognize undergraduate and graduate students’ interest in collecting books.  In its inaugural year, the “Taylor Student Book Collecting Contest, ” as it was then known,  bore a $75 first prize and a $25 second prize (see the 1957 contest poster below).  Over the years, the prize amounts have grown and the contest rules have expanded to reflect changes to the world of books.  The contest now permits digital and non-print materials to supplement the books and print materials that form the core of the collections.

Early Days: The poster for the first year of KU’s student book collecting contest, then known as the
Taylor Student Book Collecting Contest. Image courtesy of KU Libraries

Several former Snyder Book Collecting Contest winners have gone on to make collecting a lifelong pursuit.  Laird Wilcox won the contest in 1964 while an undergraduate with his collection “Ephemeral Political Movements in the United States.” Over the decades he continued to build his collection of left- and right-wing political materials and has since donated it to KU Libraries.  The Wilcox Collection of Contemporary Political Movements now stands as one of Spencer Research Library’s most-consulted collections, drawing researchers from across the country and around the world.  As we will highlight in a future post, it is the subject of Spencer’s current exhibition–“Free Speech in America: The Wilcox Collection at 50”–on display in Spencer’s gallery through April 18, 2015.

1964 Contest Winners: Laird Wilcox (left), Lawrence Morgan (second from right), and Jerry L. Ulrich (right),
with contest sponsor, Elizabeth M. Taylor, 1964. University Archives. Call Number: RG 32/40. Click image to enlarge.

Jane Albright won the Snyder Book Collecting Contest in 1977 with her Wizard of Oz collection.  She has since gone on to become one of the premier collectors of Oz and L. Frank Baum, and her collection occupies a floor of her home near of Kansas City.   Last spring, she returned to KU to share her passion with others through the exhibition, The Magic of Oz: A Collection Celebrating a Classic, which focused on some of the printed Oz, Baum, and Denslow materials in her collection.

Jane Albright with her Oz collection in 1977, the year she won the Snyder Book Collecting Contest. Image courtesy of Jane Albright.

Join in the contest’s long and illustrious history and enter your collection by the submission deadline of  Friday, March 27, 2015.  Full contest details are available on the Snyder Book Collecting Contest website.

Yesterday, KU announced a magnificent gift to the libraries and the KU Medical Campus from the estate of the late KUMC Dean Stata Norton Ringle and her husband David Ringle. One of the projects that tied Stata Norton Ringle to the Kenneth Spencer Research Library was her translation of a manuscript from our collections.  Produced circa 1562, Libro de i secretti & ricette, also known as the Jesuatti Book of Remedies (MS Pryce E1), is a collection of remedies used by the friars of the Order of Saint Jerome in Lucca, Italy to treat an array of ailments. These range from the common (digestive problems, colds, wounds and sores) to the cosmetic (baldness) to the strange (“For the crust that comes on the head of little children“) to the most dire (the plague, malaria). The remedies recorded in the manuscript are a variety of galenical mixtures of herbs, alchemical distillates, prayers, and incantations.

Jesuatti Book of Remedies. Lucca, Italy, circa 1562. Call number: MS Pryce E1. Click image to enlarge.
Image courtesy of KU Libraries Flickr Photostream.

This volume so captivated Professor Ringle that she taught herself Renaissance-era Italian to undertake its translation. The result was a digital edition, published in collaboration with KU Libraries’ Center for Digital Scholarship, that combines her annotated English translation with manuscript page images.

Browsing the digital edition, it’s easy to see why a professor of pharmacology, toxicology and therapeutics, like Dr. Ringle, would want to share this fascinating manuscript with scholars and the public at large. We have it on good authority from our web gurus that the most scatological, blush-inducing, and comically bizarre search terms driving internet traffic to the KU Libraries website tend to be page hits for the Jesuatti Book of Remedies. (I won’t list those search terms here, but this passage should give you a sense of some of the more sensitive topics the remedies address).

To celebrate the late Professor Ringle and her work, we reproduce three remedies from her translation and encourage you to continue on and peruse the entire volume online.  In her  preface, she wisely cautions that the translation is for “historical information only.”  We hope you enjoy reading these remedies, but please don’t try them at home!

Best remedy for headache. [From folio 13 verso]

Take 1 handful each of good marjoram and rosemary and make fine powder of them. In the morning take half a glass of good white wine and put therein a tablespoon of this powder, heat it and drink this early in the morning and soon you will be cured. This is also powerful to save the teeth so they will not decay and it will give you a good breath. It is the thing used by gentlemen. […]

To make gray hair dark. [From folio 19 recto]

Take equal amounts of soft dark soap and quicklime and yellow litharge and incorporate them in the form of an unguent and with this rub the gray hair several times and it will become dark. Continue this rubbing according to how you see the need as it turns from being white to dark.

Another for the aforesaid and also good. Take the juice of beets mixed with ashes made of chicken feathers and boil them together a while. Rub yourself with this in the evening when you go to sleep. […]

To remove redness from the face and make it the way one wants. [From folio 162 verso].

Take 1 ounce of native sulfur, 1 dram each of white incense and myrrh and ½ ounce of camphor. Powder everything very finely and mix it with ½ lb. of rose water and distill it in a little glass still. Preserve this water well-closed and bathe the face in the evening and morning with a sponge, rubbing well. Soon the redness of the face will disappear. This has been tested by many persons. [...]

From the Jesuatti Book of Remedies digital edition: (left) “Best remedy for headache” folio 13v; (center) “To make gray hair dark” folio 19r; and (right) “To remove redness from the face and make it the way one wants,” folio 162v. Translated with notes by Stata Norton. Electronic edition published by the Center for Digital Scholarship, University of Kansas Libraries, 2010. http://etext.ku.edu/view?docId=jesuatti/jesuatti.xml. Click images to enlarge.

Finding aids are inventories that help researchers navigate collections of manuscripts, organizational records, personal papers, and photographs. Please scroll down for a list of the Kenneth Spencer Research Library’s newest finding aids and then visit the library and explore!

Newly inventoried! A still from The Cheat (1915), part of a sizable collection of Movie Stills, 1895-1998, amassed by KU Professor of Film & Media Studies John C. Tibbetts. Call Number: MS 297, Box 1, Folder 72

• Aldiss, Brian Wilson, 1925-. Papers of Brian Wilson Aldiss, 1978-1984. (MS 214, MS Q15:5, MS R4, MS Gal 1-6)

• Antisell, Thomas, 1817-1893. Notes and Annotations in 1859 Edition of The Manufacture of Photogenic or Hydro-carbon Oils, [1860?]-1880.  (MS C79, MS 306)

• Clark, John Garretson, 1932-. Personal Papers of John G. Clark, 1900-2000. (PP 399)

• Coster, Henry J. de. Account Book of Henry J. de Coster, 1790-1802. (MS B8, MS MS P732)

• “Cousin Sallie.” Letter of “Cousin Sallie,” 1860. (RH MS P900)

• Milford (Geary), Davis County, KS. Milford, Davis County, Kansas Letters, 1880. (RH MS P910)

• Thatcher, Myrtle E. Green, 1910?-. Thatcher Family Papers, 1926-2006. (RH MS 1250, RH MS-P 1250, RH MS-P 1250 (f), RH MS-P 1250 (ff), RH MS Q349, RH MS R316)

• Heigham, Charles William. Notes and annotations relating to the history of elections in the county of Suffolk, circa 1865. (MS P727)

• Robert Mills Literary Agency. Corporate Papers of the Robert Mills Literary Agency, 1948-1989. (MS 307).

• Multiplication Table from the 16th century used as a binding fragment, 15–. (MS P731)

• Parkin, Thomas, b. 1845. Papers of Thomas Parkin, 1853, 1909. (MS P728)

• Poole, William, 1830?-. Papers of Reverend William Poole, circa. 1868. (MS P729)

• Sinclair, Upton, 1878-1968. Upton Sinclair Literary Manuscript and Correspondence, 1914-1975. (MS 299)

• Tibbetts, John C. Collection of Movie Stills, 1895-1998. (MS 297, MS Q53)

• Townley, Lucy Isabel Jones, 1885-1917. Papers and photographs of Lucy Jones Townley, 1903-1918, 1932, 1972, 1980. (RH MS 1270, RH MS-P P1270, RH MS Q83)
  

• Notes on the Treaty of Paris (1763), after February 1763. (MS P730)

• Willmann, Gustav. Diploma of Gustav Willmann, 1909. (RH MS R304)

To search across all of Spencer’s finding aids, please click here.

Caitlin Donnelly, Head of Public Services

I am absolutely thrilled to be the new Head of Public Services at Kenneth Spencer Research Library! In this position, I’ll be working with students, faculty members, scholars, and other patrons and visitors who come to the library to conduct research, attend class, or tour the North Gallery and exhibit area.

I have long been especially passionate about access, reference, instruction, and outreach in special collections. Early in my career, my personal interest in history matured into a professional enthusiasm for helping patrons connect with historical resources and the past in ways they find meaningful. More recently, my interest has evolved to focus on facilitating and expanding the use of special collections; demonstrating the relevance of history and special collections to a variety of scholarly disciplines and groups of non-academic users; and helping researchers become comfortable and competent users of special collections materials.

A native of St. Louis, Missouri, and sister of a KU alumnus, I have a BA in Humanities–American Civilization from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2004), an MA in public history from North Carolina State University (2006), and an MSLS from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2008). Before joining the team at Spencer, I was the Archivist at the Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library at the Alamo (2008-2012), where I was responsible for all duties associated with managing the archival collection. I also have additional professional experience with the Missouri State Archives-St. Louis, UNC’s Documenting the American South, the NCSU Special Collections Research Center, the UIUC Government Documents Library, and the National Park Service.

I look forward to helping improve patrons’ experiences at Spencer Research Library. Have a question about our collections, services, or procedures? Feel free to give me a call at (785) 864-4456 or drop me an email at cdonnelly@ku.edu. I look forward to hearing from you!

Caitlin Donnelly
Head of Public Services