Kenneth Spencer Research Library

Robin Hood has long been a favorite research topic of mine, and upon arriving at Spencer I was interested to see what we have available. Within Special Collections, the offerings include 19th- and 20th-century printings of the iconic Howard Pyle The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (Call Number: Children C821), collections of extant ballads (Call Number: O’Hegarty A224), and even a time travel adventure by William Wu (Call Number: ASF B2119). While most of the library’s holdings are within the Children’s Collection, I was interested in looking at some of the oldest items.

The quest for the “real” Robin Hood is as never-ending as it is ambiguous; there are very few (if any) written records that would provide evidence for Robin Hood as a historical person. The legendary outlaw is, primarily, a legendary and even mythic figure, preserved in song and popular imagination throughout the centuries.

You may be familiar with A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode as being one of the oldest ballads relating to the titular outlaw. Several of the items here at Spencer feature Lytell Geste, which comprises either the entirety of the volume (Call Number: B2069) or includes it amongst a broader collection of ballads (Call Number: O’Hegarty A224). As I was looking through them, a few things stood out to me.

The oldest volume I looked at is a 1795 edition of Joseph Ritson’s volume Robin Hood: A Collection of All the Ancient Poems, Songs, and Ballads, Now Extant, Relative to that Celebrated English Outlaw (Call Number: C4323). The legend is largely credited to items recorded by either Wynken de Wode or William Copland, as you can see here in the introduction to Ritson’s recorded version of Lytell Geste.

While I had initially limited myself to looking at Lyttel Geste, and thought I might write primarily on the poem itself, I was immediately struck by the variance in prefatory materials between editions. Most notably, Ritson includes a detailed history of Robin Hood’s early life, as well as a family tree.

As you can see, Ritson’s accounting of the life of Robin Hood situates Robin as a member of the nobility, namely the Earl of Huntingdon. One might speculate on this rhetorical choice in light of contemporary events: Was there a need to firmly situate the image of the noble class as a champion of the common person in the wake of the American Revolution? We will likely never know, but Ritson’s scholarship on the subject gives us an interesting and valuable insight into ways in which the Robin Hood mythos has shifted over the years.

Indeed, every printing of Lyttel Geste that I looked at credits Ritson in some way. The volume at call number EPM X293 is an 1820 reprinting of Ritson’s seminal work, edited for younger readers and significantly shorter in length, and which also features a “family tree” of the Earl of Huntingdon.

The other major player in the printings I looked at is a scholar by the name of John Mathew Gutch, who reprinted Ritson’s Lyttel Geste text with some heavy revisions (Call Number: O’Hegarty A213). Gutch includes a version of Lyttel Geste that had been completely rewritten by the Rev. John Eagles, not only standardizing the spelling, but changing the language entirely.

Gutch casts some aspersions on Ritson’s scholarship and provides an overview of the scholarship to date. While Gutch does not broadly contest Ritson’s claim to Robin Hood’s nobility, he takes issue with a few key points of Ritson’s argument. Namely, Gutch stipulates that Robin Hood must have been of Saxon descent rather than Norman. Gutch draws out the distinction between Norman King Richard and Saxon Robin Hood, quoting from antiquarian and fellow scholar M. Thierry as well as delving etymologically into the origins of Robin’s surname.

While I can’t speculate on the utility of Gutch drawing out this particular narrative thread during his contemporary setting, I can say that it is a rich insight into possible interpretations of the story. There is general agreement that Robin Hood’s narrative fits best into the latter half of the 12th century, during the Princes’ Crusade, during which there is a noted divide between the French-speaking Norman aristocracy and the English-speaking common people.

The story of Robin Hood has long been mutable, with its various written forms being complemented or augmented by a rich oral history that is, for obvious reasons, unavailable to us here at Spencer. As Gutch says, “the surprising adventures of this chief of bandits of the twelfth century, his victories over the men of foreign race, his stratagems and escapes, were long the only stock of national history that a plan Englishman of those ages transmitted to his sons, after receiving it from his forefathers.” Robin Hood continues to fascinate and charm even outside of the era of his origin.

I had initially thought that limiting myself to comparing variations between versions of a singular poem would be a small enough scope for a blog post. As so often happens, I was mistaken. Even looking at just four items, I uncovered a wealth of information to dive into and a thousand threads of inquiry to follow. If you, too, are an aspiring outlaw hobbyist, I encourage you to peruse the following items, both at Spencer and in the broader KU Libraries collection.  

Grace Brazell
Administrative Associate

Selected Further Reading at KU Libraries:

• John Mathew Gutch’s scholarship on Robin Hood, 1847 (Call Number: PR2125 .G8)
• Reading Robin Hood: Content, Form and Reception in the Outlaw Myth by Stephen Knight, 2015 (Call Number: PR2129 .K57 2015)
• Images of Robin Hood: Medieval to Modern by Lois Potter, 2008 (Call Number: PR2129 .I63 2008)

Selected Further Reading at Spencer:

• Headlong Hall. : Nightmare Abbey. ; Maid Marian. ; Crotchet Castle by Thomas Love Peacock, 1837 (Call Number: O’Hegarty B4480)
• The English Archer; Or, Robert Earl of Huntingdon, Vulgarly Called Robin Hood, 1821, 1823 (Call Number: B1177)
• The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood of Great Renown, in Nottinghamshire by Howard Pyle, 1940 (Call Number: Children C101)
• Robin Hood and Little John or the Merry Men of Sherwood Forest by Pierce Egan, 1850 (Call Number: O’Hegarty D168)
• Robin Hood and the Archers of Merrie Sherwood by George Emmett, approximately 1875 (Call Number: O’Hegarty D275)
• Robin Hood and His Merry Foresters by Joseph Cundall, 1850 (Call Number: Children 1258A)

Kenneth Spencer Research Library’s current short-term exhibit explores some choice items from the library’s collection of medieval seals. This is a collaborative project put together by myself – Kaya Taylor – and my collaborator Eli Kumin, both of us long-time student workers here at the library.

Eli and I have cultivated a particular interest in medieval wax seals, spurred on by our work on a Sanders Scholar research project under the supervision of Dr. John McEwan. Beginning in September 2024, we spent the project exploring the Abbey Dore collection (Call Number: MS Q80) at Spencer, given the remarkably well-preserved seals and documents dating back from the 12th and 13th centuries. As the project came to a close in May 2025, Eli and I realized that we could memorialize our work and interests in the form of an exhibit case. Titled Sigillum, it is our way of giving others a look into these fascinating and unique pieces of history, here to be enjoyed roughly 4,000 miles away from where they originated.

The overarching narrative of the Abbey Dore collection is one of property and the interplay between royal and religious power in the medieval period. The language used in the documents points to the exchange of land for the salvation of the donors and their loved ones, e.g. “for her soul and the soul of Madoc [her husband]” (Call Number: MS Q80:13).

Visitors may notice there is one document unlike the others in the exhibit case, labeled “land conveyance of Sir Roger Lasceles to his four daughters” (Call Number: MS C150). Although separate from the Abbey Dore collection, this document is included because it’s a particular favorite of ours and it boasts several unique qualities: a chirograph edge and three intact seals with very clear impressions. We chose to include it at the starting point of the exhibit because of its eye-catching quality, pulling visitors into the discussion of further seals and documents within the case.

Although Eli and I came to know the Abbey Dore collection very well over time, we still felt a bit confused as to the relative geography of the Welsh Marches and the locations mentioned in the collection. We felt that visitors could benefit from seeing a map of the region, and so we resolved to make one that centered the relevant places and landmarks stretching across the Welsh-English border. Ultimately, we used ArcGIS software to put together the map seen in the exhibit.

We hope that Sigillum gives visitors a chance to appreciate not just the wax seals themselves, but the real human stories that stand behind them. We are excited to offer this glimpse into the medieval past, and grateful for the opportunity to bring these objects to light at Kenneth Spencer Research Library.

Sigillum: Seals and the Making of Medieval Authority is free and open to the public in Spencer’s North Gallery through July 31st.

Kaya Taylor and Eli Kumin
Public Services student assistants
KU Libraries Sanders Scholars 2024-2025

This Monday is “Bloomsday,” an annual celebration of the day (June 16, 1904) on which James Joyce’s novel Ulysses is set. “Bloomsday” takes its name from one of the book’s central characters, Leopold Bloom, and each June 16^th fans of Joyce and Ulysses often celebrate with marathon readings of the novel and other events. In honor of Bloomsday 2025, we’re highlighting a figure without whom Ulysses might not have been published—Sylvia Beach (1887-1962)—and Beach’s connection to an equally-interesting (though less well-known) Lawrence resident, Jane van Meter (1906-1992).

As those well-versed in lore surrounding Ulysses will know, Sylvia Beach was an American living in Paris who ran a bookshop and lending library named Shakespeare and Company. The bookshop served as a hub for expatriate literary life on Paris’s Left Bank during the years between the two world wars. It was Beach and Shakespeare and Company who published Ulysses in 1922. Beach had stepped in following the obscenity case in New York courts which saw the editors of The Little Review fined for the magazine’s serialization of episodes from Ulysses. This ruling left publishers, including Joyce’s US publisher Huebsch, wary of the legal troubles and financial risks involved in publishing a novel that would likely be seized before its costs could be recouped in sales. Though not normally a publisher, Beach, working in the more permissive publishing environment of France, volunteered to take on the task in order to champion a writer and a novel she admired.

To help offset the costs of production, Shakespeare and Company sold copies of Ulysses by subscription in advance of its printing, offering the novel in three different paper formats at different price points (350, 250, and 150 Francs).  Of the 1000 copies of first edition of Ulysses, Spencer Research Library holds examples of all three different paper issues (four copies in total), including the scarcest issue, which was numbered from 1-100 on Dutch handmade paper and signed by Joyce. 

Much has been written about the publication history of Ulysses, so we won’t re-tread that ground here, and instead we’ll turn to a Lawrence figure with deep ties to Beach and Shakespeare and Company: Jane van Meter.  Van Meter moved to Lawrence in 1960 with her then husband, the Shakespearean scholar, Charlton Hinman.  Though the couple later divorced, van Meter remained in Lawrence until her death in 1992. She was a memorable figure on campus, known by some as “the Blue Lady,” for her habit of always wearing a powder blue outfit.[1]  Before her marriage, however, van Meter had worked as an assistant to Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare and Company. Hired in 1932, ten years after the publication of Ulysses, van Meter nevertheless found herself amidst the various writers still living in and passing through Paris, including Joyce. 

At the shop, van Meter quickly made herself an indispensable and highly trusted employee.  In her memoir, Shakespeare and Company, Beach wrote of her, “The first and only really professional assistant I ever had was Miss Jane van Meter […]. I had put an ad in the Paris Herald Tribune, and Miss van Meter answered it. I couldn’t wish anybody better luck than to have her as an assistant.”[2]  As the correspondence now housed at Spencer Library shows, van Meter was even trusted to handle operations of the bookstore and lending library while Beach traveled to Savoie for the summer with her partner, Adrienne Monnier, who ran a French language bookshop/lending library, La Maison des Amis des Livres, across the street on the rue de l’Odéon. After van Meter left Paris and the job in late 1935, Beach continued to write to her, often updating her, especially in the early years, on goings on in and around the bookstore. In a March 6^th, 1936 letter, Beach was clearly feeling the loss of her right-hand woman, writing to van Meter, “You are still and always will be a part of the Firm [i.e. Shakespeare and Company] and one of the best friends I ever had. And I miss you so.”  Beach then continues by outlining some of the shortcomings of the woman helping out in van Meter’s absence:

…she has done her best (or worst) to help me but there is nothing on which we see ‘eye-to-eye.’  You ought to hear her disparaging remarks about the ‘seances’ which everyone else has found so interesting.  She says “living is better than to bury ones nose in silly stuffy books” etc., that [French writer] Jules Romain (looking at his portrait) has an ignoble mouth and his eyes give one an impression that he is positively ‘louche’; that Joyce’s head is terrifying, and that she doesn’t see why Adrienne and I treated [André] Gide with such respect when he came one day to talk about his reading and where he was to sit. So we shall soon have to part. […]

In the same letter, Beach also reports on the various literary goings on around the shop, including readings at Shakespeare and Company by the French writers André Gide (February 1^st) and Paul Valéry (February 29^th), with James Joyce in attendance:

Jane I wish you could have been here for Gide and Valéry!  They went off beautifully, as Agnes has probably told you. Gide read passages from his next novel Geneviève in a remarkable way, in spite of a bad cold and chills & fever from which he complained he was suffering. […] And Valéry read some fascinating unpublished prose pieces on the alphabet, and ‘Narcisse’ – then at Joyce’s request, ‘Le serpent.’ It was so fine – everybody was carried away by it.  The Paulhans were there, and the Churches and a M. Lu[??]gneaux director of the TSF, and Destin & Clive Bell, and Joyce brought his son Georgio [sic] and his wife, and Carlotta sat with the Valéry family who was ‘au complet’ but he had asked them not to sit where he could see them – he had seen them so often he couldn’t read with them in front of him, which amused them very much.  They came to hear Gide too, also Joyce. These readings, in spite of having to move all of the furniture out of the shop every time, are really interesting and a pleasure.  I think you would have enjoyed them.

The more than 80 letters from Beach in the van Meter collection are often full of such fascinating details of writers, literature, and Paris life. Many of Sylvia Beach’s letters to van Meter are from the 1930s and 1940s, but the two women continued to correspond into the 1950s, even sending books and other gifts to one another from time to time. Shakespeare and Company closed in 1941, during the German occupation, though Adrienne Monnier’s La Maison des Amis des Livres remained in business until 1951. The collection includes a letter, dated October 22, 1955 (MS 383, Box 1, Folder 29), that Beach sent discussing Monnier’s death:

 I don’t know whether you have heard the news of Adrienne’s death in June. My sister who lives in Greenwich, as you know, was making me a visit [in Paris] at the time. Adrienne suffered dreadfully. I am glad that it is over. But no use in trying to be happy without Adrienne, as you know. […] 

It was a profound loss for Beach; the couple had been together for over 35 years. Monnier killed herself after being in poor health for some time, including a 1954 diagnosis of Ménière’s disease, which was (and remains) incurable. The last dated letter from Beach to van Meter in the collection is from November of 1955, however they must have continued to correspond beyond that since van Meter’s collection includes a copy of Les années vingt: les écrivains Américains a Paris et leurs amis, published in 1959, that is inscribed “For Jane with love from Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia.”  Beach died in Paris in 1962, and her papers are housed at Princeton University. Van Meter’s care in preserving Beach’s letters and materials related to her studies in France suggest the importance that period held for her.

The story of how these materials came to be housed at Spencer Research Library is an interesting one, too. In 1967, Jane van Meter met Wayne Propst at the Kansas Union while he was a student at KU. Despite their age difference, the two developed a long-running friendship, and Propst helped to care for van Meter in her later years. Propst, a writer and artist (and a countercultural figure around Lawrence in his own right), recently published a remembrance of van Meter in the volume Embattled Lawrence Kansas: The Enduring Struggle for Freedom (2022).  Materials used for this piece also appear in the collection.

It is thanks to Propst that Spencer Research Library houses Sylvia Beach’s letters to Jane van Meter. Propst donated them, alongside other materials related to Jane van Meter’s time in France, to the library on June 16^th (Bloomsday), 2022. It is only fitting, then, that we celebrate Bloomsday 2025 by highlighting the correspondence of two women, Sylvia Beach and Jane van Meter, who had been at the center of literary life on Paris’s Left Bank during the interwar years.

Want to learn more? 

• Visit Spencer Research Library and explore the Jane van Meter Collection (MS 383)
• Read Sylvia Beach’s account of the publication of Ulysses (1922) and other stories of Paris life in her memoir, Shakespeare and Company (1959). Copies are available at Spencer Research Library and in KU’s circulating Collections.
• Read Wayne Propst’s piece on Jane van Meter in Embattled Lawrence Kansas: The Enduring Struggle for Freedom (2022), edited by Dennis Domer.  The volume includes articles outlining different and overlooked aspects of Lawrence’s history by various authors, including current and retired KU faculty and staff.
• Read  works by Wayne S. Propst in Spencer Research Library’s collections.
• Check out two past Bloomsday Spencer Research Library blog posts from 2012 and 2013.

Elspeth Healey
Special Collections Curator

[1] Indeed, van Meter was featured in a 2019 UDK article by Liam Mays titled “5 Lawrence legends from ‘Tan Man’ to ‘White Owl:’ Names that stand the test of time”: https://www.kansan.com/arts_and_culture/5-lawrence-legends-from-tan-man-to-white-owl-names-that-stand-the-test-of/article_274676c0-12df-11ea-a220-735c1d0bde70.html, though some of the details about Van Meter in the article are more accurate than others.

[2] Beach, Sylvia. Shakespeare and Company. New York: Harcourt, Brace, [1959]: 209. Call #: Joyce Y316.

Well-loved children’s books spark the magic from the thrill of adventure to imagination of far-off, enchanted places. Beloved by generations, children’s classic stories remain with us throughout life, whether it’s re-reading childhood favorites or sharing our most loved stories with young people in our lives. These classics ignite imaginations and impart timeless lessons. They become some of our most cherished friends that stay with us throughout our lives.

Spencer Research Library has a vast children’s book collection to be explored. Some works have multiple editions published throughout the years. Different editions often have different illustrations, annotations, and even adaptations. This is the first post in a series highlighting various children’s book titles in Spencer’s holdings. First up, we bring you Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Spencer Research Library has seven holdings of Treasure Island. The publisher, publication date, and call number of each volume are listed below:

• Cassell & Company, Limited: London, Paris, New York & Melbourne, 1886 (O’Hegarty B2959).
• Scribner’s Sons: New York, 1913 (SC Annex 326).
• Rand McNally: New York and Chicago, copyrighted 1916, published 1928 (Children C623).
• Grosset & Dunlap: New York, 1934? (Children 5948).
• Limited Editions Club: New York, 1941 (D7309).
• Award Books: New York, 195-? (Children B2846).
• Franklin Watts: New York, 1964 (C18419).

This introduction appears in most editions of the book:

To the Hesitating Purchaser

If sailor tales to sailor tunes,
Storm and adventure, heat and cold,
If schooners, islands, and maroons
And Buccaneers and buried Gold,
And all the old romance, retold
Exactly in the ancient way,
Can please, as me they pleased of old,
The wiser youngsters of to-day:

–So be it, and fall on! If not,
If studious youth no longer crave,
His ancient appetites forgot,
Kingston, or Ballantyne the brave,
Or Cooper of the wood and wave:
So be it also! And may I
And all my pirates share the grave
Where these and their creations lie!

The first edition of Treasure Island – published by Cassell & Company in 1883 – featured no illustrations. Three years later, the publisher released a new edition with 18 pages of illustrations and 26 leaves of plates.

Maps of the island do not appear in every edition. Those that are included vary in detail, from topography and landmark descriptions.

The 1941 edition of Treasure Island, published by the Limited Editions Club, was limited to 1,500 copies.  Spencer Library’s edition is numbered 1,426. Colored Illustrations signed by Edward A. Wilson – which includes a signed lithograph of Long John Silver – and the unique binding of dark blue sailcloth and gold-stamped red leather spine label makes this edition a highly sought collectible.

Rand McNally published several editions of Treasure Island over the years. Kenneth Spencer Research Library holdings include a 1928 edition copyrighted in 1916. This edition features a durable hardback binding with full-page color illustrations along with black and white drawings. 

Details are scarce for many cover images. Several editions from this period featured Jim Hawkins or Long John Silver, given their key roles in the story. 

Meredith Phares
Operations Manager

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