Kenneth Spencer Research Library

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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[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.”

What makes a monster, well, monstrous? Monsters carry the fears of the people that create them, tapping into existential dreads and cultural tensions to flay our superficial defenses and expose the weak societal organs and vulnerabilities beneath. Today, our monsters array from the cannibalistic and supernatural vampires of Sinners to Barbarian’s brutal, lonesome and pitiable Mother – and the movie’s true monster, a landlord. 

In the later Middle Ages, however, monsters sometimes played a more ambivalent role than violent antagonists. The word “monster” derives from the Latin “monēre” or “to warn, to admonish.” These monsters embodied omens or manifested God’s admonishment of human behavior, inviting conscious and deliberate analysis and contemplation on their meanings. So-called “monstrous races” were born from tales and anecdotes of human and human-like peoples born in far-off lands, repurposing anecdotal entrails from the Bible and classical authors like Pliny the Elder into haruspices of divine interpretation. They were frequent subjects of fascination and debate for their meanings, paired with prodigies and marvels as the myriad ways that God’s will manifested in nature and the real world, as well as theological debates as to whether such races possessed souls and could be converted to Christianity. 

Konrad Lykosthenes was one such interpreter, a humanist and encyclopedist who sought to sew together a comprehensive history of signs, prodigies, and portents from biblical times into his own modernity with his Prodigiorum ac ostentorvm chronicon [Chronicle of Prodigies and Signs]. He built a body of text from the limbs of other historical and contemporary sources onto which he sutured his own interpretations. These portents included everything from natural disasters like earthquakes to the appearance of mythical and monstrous creatures, as well as so-called “wonders,” “marvels,” and “monstrous” births. His work proved sensationalist and popular, a theological treatise that leaned lurid and sometimes traded on the grisly and gruesome to appeal to a wider audience. 

By the end of the sixteenth century, science and medicine had pierced their talons into the tender underbelly of the study of monstrosities, clawing it away from the sole purview of priests, philosophers, and theologians. With that shift, natural historians like Ulisse Aldrovandi and physicians like Fortunio Liceti dissected the meanings of monstrosities not as reflections of divine will or intent, but as natural phenomena that could be classified and analyzed under the newly invented microscope. 

Ulisse Aldrovandi sought to document all forms of nature, collecting a cabinet of curiosity with over 7,000 specimens – including an alleged and infamous dragon, likely fabricated by grafting together the stuffed carcasses of other animals. From those studies and collections he wrote over 400 volumes on everything from mollusks to metals. Monsters were a natural inclusion, and thus was wrought his Monstrorum Historia, the eleventh of a fourteen-volume encyclopedia. It bled together what we today treat as unequivocally monstrous creatures – centaurs and satyrs – with concepts that today we might conceive as mere medical conditions, such as neurofibromatosis or hypertrichosis, transplanting alien viscera of exotic monstrosity into the hollow body cavity of the reader’s imagination and understanding of nature. Aldrovandi’s amalgamation of monstrous creatures, humans, and hybrids reflected an ambition to reflect a complete and total natural history of monsters in parallel to birds, fish, and all of the natural world, rather than flensing the impossible from the plausible like extraneous fat from muscle and meat. 

In De Monstrorum causibus [On the Causes of Monsters], Fortunio Liceti, meanwhile, purported to analyze monsters not only as a phenomena born from nature – or “nature’s mistakes” or even its jokes and pranks – rather than divine will, but also sought their causes and their taxonomic classifications a landmark in teratology – the study of monsters which today has come to mean the study of congenital birth defects. The modern conflation is no accident, as Liceti’s work treats them as one and the same: monsters were born, not made, and his work discusses everything from dog-headed humans to conjoined twins, framed in antithesis to the ideal or perfect human body that was increasingly the focus of medical study.  

Liceti described monsters not as warnings or admonishments but as “showings,” claiming that the term derived from “monstrare,” or “to demonstrate or show.” His examination of “monsters” demystified them and challenged the portentous interpretations of monstrosities that deemed them a reflection of the wrath of God upon the parent or their community writ large. This metamorphosed monstrosities into something not inherently ominous or harrowing but still oozing with interpretations. 

As we examine historical horrors, it invites a vivisection of our own insecurities and fears, to peel back the flesh of our society and examine the sinews beneath that tie together our own identities: What do we think of as monstrous, and why? When does humanity itself become monstrous? And when something goes bump in the night, what are we really afraid of? 

All of above books will be on display at this year’s Haunting Humanities event this Wednesday, October 29th, 5:30 to 9pm at Abe and Jake’s Landing (800 E. 6th Street), together with an array of horrifying, prodigious, and compelling activities, including a monstrously-themed escape room in a box, coloring pages, Rare Book Bingo, monster reviews, and more. Come contemplate the meanings of monstrosity with us and walk away with your own nightmares to divine. 

Eve Wolynes
Special Collections Curator

How was knowledge, ranging from the scientific, pious, entrepreneurial, and artistic, to the preposterous, transmitted through the historic movement of print and manuscript material in and around Japan?

Setting out to tackle this question in Spring 2025, students in the University of Kansas History of Art Department Japanese art history seminar “Manuscripts, Maps, and Illustrated Books” had the opportunity to curate this exhibition, working with materials from The Kenneth Spencer Research Library collection. Selected works range from 1646 to 1936, including detailed cartography, woodblock-printed imagery, and religious paraphernalia. Journeying from Japan to the West and back again, this exhibition spans three centuries and five intersecting themes.

Opened on July 31, 2025, the exhibition’s five cases follow the themes given below. In addition, a special event in the gallery on Wednesday, September 3, 2025 (3:30-4:45) will feature mini presentations on selected works by each seminar student. The exhibit will remain open through January 9, 2026.

1. Mapping and Conceptions of Space demonstrates that as Japan moved toward the 19th century, its awareness of the world beyond its islands gradually increased. Interactions with foreign visitors fostered an exchange of culture and knowledge that diffused into every area of society, including Japanese cartographic practices.

Representations of space in both image and text indicate the geographical information deemed most important. From spiritual landmarks and cosmological beliefs to political boundaries and travel logistics, these historical maps and guides reveal how users’ conceptions of East Asia were shaped at the time.

While overseas travel remained restricted throughout the 17th to 19th centuries, these materials demonstrate an expanding awareness of domestic and global geographies, depicted using both traditional Japanese mapmaking and novel observations from Western travelers.  

2. Tourism and Movement of People explores how travel shaped the visual culture and national identity of Japan from the seventeenth century through the turn of the 20th century. The depictions of elaborate 17th-to 19th-century processions of feudal lords evoke an earlier era of ceremonial travel and spectacle, emphasizing traditional routes and social hierarchies.

Hiroshige Toyokuni meiga hyakushu daimyō dōchū 広重豊国名画百種大名道中
(One Hundred Famous Views of a Daimyo’s Journey by Hiroshige and Toyokuni). Tokyo: Tōkōen, 1918. Call Number: E3579. Click image to enlarge.

By the early 20th century, Japan’s interest in travel shifted toward promoting tourism as a tool for modernization and imperial expansion into regions such as Manchuria (Northeast China), Hokkaido and Korea. Postcards, travel guidebooks, and government-issued pamphlets offered carefully curated images and structured itineraries for both foreign and domestic travelers.

Together, these materials illustrate changing conceptions of travel, from symbolic displays of authority to strategic assertions of national identity.

3. Pilgrimage and Movement of Religions reflects upon the spread of foreign faiths to Japan, as well as the pivotal role of bodily and spiritual journeys within religious beliefs and practices. Originating in India, Buddhism spread to Japan in the sixth century and since developed into a major religion with a profound influence on daily life. Buddhist practitioners frequently visit temples and undertake pilgrimages along designated routes, seeking face-to-face encounters with deities through their icons.

In many legends, sacred Buddhist icons demonstrate miraculous power and compassion by journeying across land and sea. Movement occurs not only across geographical spaces, but also between the earthly realm and Buddhist paradises.

However, not all foreign religions were warmly received in Japan. A few decades after its introduction by Jesuit missionaries, Christianity faced severe persecutions in the late 16th and 17th centuries, reflecting state and local resistance to beliefs imported from distant shores.

4. Trade and Movement of Goods offers a window into the commercial world of Japan and the global trade networks that developed from the movement of goods. Print culture in Japan served not only to document commodities but also to shape how goods were seen, valued, and consumed. From tea catalogs to textile pattern books and beer advertisements, the objects in this case reveal how trade goods were embedded in shifting notions of taste, identity, and national power.

Although trade across East Asia dates back millennia, commercial exchange between Japan and the West began to grow from the 17th century and intensified at the turn of the 20th century. With objects and knowledge flowing between Japan, broader Asia, and the West, print media itself became a commodity, as demand for Japanese goods expanded. These publications offer a window into the commercial world of Japan, its transnational material culture, and the global trade networks that developed from the movement of goods.

5. Virtual Travel and Fantasies of Asia examines printed materials from the 17th to the 20th century that depicted Japan’s culture and shaped Western fantasies of Asia, constructing descriptions that blurred fact and fiction.

Through these objects, virtual travel, the concept of journeying to another place through imagination, was made possible for Europeans and Americans alike.

Japan also capitalized on print media, seeking to reconstruct its self-image as modern and legitimize its global relevance in the 20th century. These books, fashion plates, and inventive illustrations reveal the breadth of cultural dialogue between East and West, offering visions of Japan in which curiosity, exoticization, and national identity came together.

These treasures that traveled out of The Kenneth Spencer Research Library stacks into this exhibition represent but a fraction of the library’s holdings of Asian material, which are all available upon patron request. Notably, several of the items included were collected by Kate Hansen (1879–1968), a Kansan who lived in Japan as a missionary and music teacher during 1907–1941 and 1947–1951.

After finalizing the exhibition details, a new acquisition was made to the library’s collection that fit the exhibition theme so well we decided to add it to a bonus case. Please come look for this wonderful mystery item. Hint: polar bears!

We hope that these displays will move viewers to appreciate how people of the past sought creative strategies that blended image with text to excite and inspire the transmission of knowledge in and around Japan.

Sherry Fowler (drawing from collaborative exhibition text)
Professor of Japanese Art History, History of Art
University of Kansas

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Faculty advisor: Sherry Fowler, Professor of Japanese Art History, History of Art, University of Kansas

Student curators: Yuan-Hsi Chao, Brady Cullen, Aria Diao, Shangyi Lyu, Olivia Song, Emma Smith, Rebekah Staton, Heeryun Suh, Eli Troen, and Morgan Williamson

Library advisor: Eve Wolynes, Special Collections Curator, University of Kansas Libraries

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In the course of my work as a conservator at KU Libraries, one of my favorite bookbinding features to spot “in the wild” is paste paper. A book covered in paste paper might come to the lab for treatment, or I might catch sight of one while working in the stacks, and I always take a moment to look at them closely and enjoy the variety of colors, patterns, and styles that paste papers come in. It was no easy task to narrow down Spencer’s abundant selection of paste papers to just a few volumes that will be on view in a temporary exhibit in the North Gallery through August and September.

Paste paper is a style of decorative paper made by coating the surface of paper with a thick pigmented starch adhesive (usually wheat paste or methylcellulose) and then manipulating the wet paste mixture to create patterns. Combs, stamps, brushes, wadded paper or textiles, rollers, fingers and more could be used to create designs. Paste papers were an economical alternative to marbled papers, which required a high degree of skill and costly materials to produce. No special training or supplies were needed to make paste papers; bookbinders could create them right in their workshops with materials already at hand. 

Paste papers were most often used for book covers and endpapers and were popular from the late 16^th through the 18^th century. Paste papers are often seen on books from Germany and Northern Europe, although there are many lovely examples of block-printed paste papers from Italy. There was renewed interest in paste papers during the Arts & Crafts movement of the late 19^th and early 20^th century. Today, paste papers are still created by book artists and hobbyists, and can be seen on some fine-press editions. The examples on view represent just a fraction of the many beautiful paste papers found in Spencer’s collections and available to view in the Reading Room.

Pulled (or veined) paste papers were created by coating two sheets of paper with the colored paste, pressing the two pasted sides together, and then pulling the sheets apart, creating a unique wave-like pattern on each sheet.

Drawn paste papers (also called scraped or combed) were made by “fingerpainting” in the wet paste or dragging various implements through the paste layer. The results can range from painterly and whimsical to clean and graphic. A faux wood graining tool was used to create the pattern on Summerfield E156 (second from left).

These are two very different examples of daubed paste papers: a boldly colored design executed in a thick layer of paste, and a subtle pattern possibly created with stiff brush bristles.

This charming stamped (or printed) design appears, appropriately, on the cover of a book about decorative papers used in bookbinding. An assortment of stamps in architectural shapes were pressed into the paste to create the pattern. Spattered (or sprinkled) papers were made by loading a brush with the colored paste mixture and striking the brush while holding it above the paper, creating a shower of drops.

Block printed paste papers used a matrix, probably carved as for a woodblock print, that was “inked” with the colored paste and stamped onto the paper. These designs can be simple or ornate and often use multiple colors. On Summerfield C1300 (at left) the binder used block printed papers in two different patterns.

In these examples the makers have used a combination of techniques on a single sheet: stamped over drawn, drawn over pulled, and so on. D2763 (at right) is also an example of a paste paper created using a colored sheet of paper, instead of white or light paper, as the starting point.

In Conservation Services we sometimes make paste papers to use in our own bookbinding models or in book making activities for colleagues or the public. Making paste papers is a fun and messy activity that invites exploration of colors, patterns, and mark-making tools. There are many online tutorials for making paste papers at home; bookbinder Erin Fletcher has a great video and written instructions on her blog. Tutorial // Paste Papers – Flash of the Hand

For more on paste papers, see Head of Conservation Services Whitney Baker’s 2012 blog post: Kenneth Spencer Research Library Blog » Historic Fingerpainting Seems More Dignified.

Angela Andres, special collections conservator

This post was written Public Services student assistant Kit Cavazos as part of their summer internship supervised by KU English Professor Misty Schieberle and Special Collections Curator Eve Wolynes.

Although medieval manuscripts are well-known for their look and style, the act of actually reading and understanding one can be tough. The image that often comes to mind is that of their non-naturalistic drawings, and thus, a casual viewer may see the squiggles sprinkled across the text as another odd decoration. However, many serve specific and intentional functions, acting as contractions, substitutions, or abbreviations of words or parts of words. Scribes often chose this practice because it saved on ink and parchment space, since both these materials were quite expensive.

The first and most prominent thing to note about manuscript notation is the dashes that are most often placed over vowels. Most of the time, these indicate a missing letter N or M. For example, “terram” shortens to “terrā.” The page above has quite a few examples in the first line: “qua[m],” “lapide[m],” and “lapide[m].”

Dashes can often have other meanings when interacting with a consonant, either by hovering above or crossing the letter. The incipit line of the above page has a quite recognizable first word, which substitutes an I for a J. This letter difference is generally because Latin, as a language, does not use the letter J, meaning our first word is “Judea.” Thus it is easier to understand part of the next noun, which has a letter L with a dash intersecting it, with the result resembling a stylized letter T. Picking out when a letter is a T or an L is made easy by way of comparison, as the page’s script will always have a style that differentiates letter that could be confused.

Thus, this L with an intersecting dash in the spine could represent a few similar letter clumps: “ler…,” “…ul,” “lor…,” or “al…,” among others. Despite knowing exactly what variations the letter could stand for, it still introduces a new wrinkle into the fold, as none of the suggested meanings for the substitutions seem to make the word wholly understandable. “Jerlerm,” “Jerulm,” “Jerlorm,” and “Jeralm” are not proper words, and thus, the contraction demonstrates how common words (such as proper nouns) could have more of an abstract contraction. When examining this word in context, it might be a bit easier to understand that this contraction represents the city named “Jerusalem.”

Another common symbol is this: , which often represents a “rum,” “ram,  or “rem” sort of ending. The above example has multiple instances of its use within the first line, all taking the first possible ending. The line, when uncontracted, would read “verbi salutaris ac miraculorum suorum dulcidine” (“by the sweetness of his saving word and miracles”). These textual changes – both contractions and substitutions – indicate that both scribes and readers needed to have not only a deep understanding of what each symbol represented, but also a sense of the language. You could either look at the Latin and parse some words, or you could understand how to complete the words but have their meaning completely lost on you. This afforded the literate members of the population some form of exclusivity from everyone else. These manuscripts often contain important information about plants, animals, or other general encyclopedic knowledge.

Another important aspect of a manuscript is additions that enhance a reader’s understanding of the text. The most obvious would be the fingers pointing to specific lines. These are manicules, and they are meant to emphasize important parts of the text. Another detail does something similar on the above page. The red lines highlighting specific letters are forms of rubrication, and they have a very similar function to manicules. In this instance, they mean to indicate and emphasize the capital letters in the line.

In other instances, rubrication notates significant parts of the text and frequently has a moralizing meaning. This means it can also come in textual form – often called the rubric – and it can add, emphasize, or reiterate important information to the reader. The term rubrication comes from the Latin word “ruber” (“red”), but important elements to a manuscript are not restricted solely to one color. Red often sees the most use, but blue and occasionally green can also be used for emphasis or decoration.

With these basic understandings of common aspects of a medieval text (at least within the Spencer collection), reading a manuscript for the first time may be less daunting. The above page, for example, has several features already discussed. Most prominently, the rubrication stands out from the rest of the content, especially in the rubricated initial letters A and I, which have blue decoration that appears to mimic a lace design. The first rubricated word of the text is in the incipit line, which has the same L with an intersecting dash as before. Thus, we know the word would be something like “pp[ul]m” or something similar. If you don’t have a book on contractions easily to hand, sometimes sounding out what letters you do have can help make sense of the word – “populum,” in this instance. Thus, reading through the incipit line, it would say something like “Absol[v]e q[uaesumu]s D[omine] p[o]p[u]l[um] n[ostr]o[rum] vincula peccato[rum]” (“we beseech you, O Lord, to absolve our people from the bonds of their sins”). From even just this first line, we can understand that the reader is meant to focus on the people or population about whom it is speaking.

Reading through a medieval text can be difficult; even just reading one line without translation can take hours, depending on how many contractions or abbreviations there are, as well as how obscure each one may be. The result, though, is quite often rewarding, as it means modern readers can understand how information was relayed and what information medieval writers saw as needing to be relayed. An online resource for information on specific abbreviations is Cappelli’s Latin Abbreviations, which has been incredibly helpful for research and compiling the transcription of these lines.

Kit Cavazos
Public Services student assistant