Kenneth Spencer Research Library

The Summerfield Collection at Kenneth Spencer Research Library consists of early-modern printed books, but the focus of a current project supervised by Special Collections Curator Eve Wolynes is to identify instances of binder’s waste and, when possible, identify their original source. Binder’s waste is a term for when parts or pages of an older, often medieval, manuscript are reused as part of the structure of a book’s binding. This could mean the boards of a book, structural support for the spine, or more decorative details like the cover, flyleaves, or similar. Many of the materials used as examples here are currently available for viewing – with a second case of materials highlighting illustrations by Edward Gorey – in Spencer’s North Gallery through May 29th.

Beginning with structure, the most obvious examples of reuse can be found in the interior of a volume, generally on the boards near the spine. This kind of reuse is generally to help support either just the spine or the adherence of the boards and the spine together. Lorenzo Valla’s Elegantiae (Call Number: Summerfield B1962) has an example of this as the paper pasted on top (pastedown) has worn away enough to show some of the reuse (Fig. 1). This is clearly a medieval text, and – while it is fragmented – some of the words such as “Johannes” in the body text and “baptista” in the marginal notation among other examples illustrate that the focus of the text is on John the Baptist.

An example of more spinal support (Fig. 2.1) is seen in Analysis Logica Libri S. Lucae Qui Inscribitur Acta Apostoloru (Call Number: Summerfield B698). The strips are another method in which reuse occurs, though it can also be in longer or wider strips. The strips in this particular volume do not have any text or decoration remaining, so their exact origin cannot be certain. However, it is possible they come from the same leaf that was used to make the cover (Fig. 2.2). Based on the text visible both from the interior of the spine and the exterior cover, we can find that the lyrics to the music sheet are from “Lauda Sion,” a Christian hymn that celebrates Jesus Christ. Reuse of music sheets is fairly common within the Summerfield Collection, likely due to the rubrication and various ink colors or decoration that may accompany them.

Music, although not a particularly popular feature, was not an uncommon form of reuse, either because of its wide availability or because it had some aspect of artistry and thus aesthetic interest for a cover. While actual music sheets may have been popular, texts of chant or hymnal lyrics are also quite common. A book of hours in the Summerfield Collection (Call Number: Summerfield B2890) has one such instance of reuse as the cover consists of a chant to laud St. Louis (Ludovicus in Latin), which would likely have been performed during Mass (Fig. 3).

There were, of course, numerous other ways to reuse materials, but these are some of the most common examples within Spencer’s holdings. While some of the items are currently part of the temporary exhibit, the Summerfield Collection is always available for access in the Reading Room at Kenneth Spencer Research Library.

Kit Cavazos
Public Services student assistant

American author Henry V. Miller (1891-1980) is a divisive literary figure, one who has amassed a dedicated cult following, and yet, whose presence in scholarly discourse has traditionally been somewhat limited. Miller is most widely known for his years in Paris, which resulted in the notorious Tropic of Cancer (1934), famously banned for obscenity in the United States for nearly three decades. Despite his popular characterization as a writer who magnified the obscene and grotesque, it’s not uncommon to find Miller falling into extended, heartfelt reveries covering a profound range of subjects, a contrast that contributes to his reputation as an eclectic writer.

Spencer Library holds a wide range of Henry Miller’s published works, such as an edition of Plexus (1963) limited to two thousand copies. However, the item that might be of most interest to the Miller enthusiast is a small collection of his papers (Call Number: MS P216). This collection primarily consists of typewritten onionskin manuscripts dating from the 1930s, as well as handwritten letters composed during the 1950s. I found the typewritten pieces particularly intriguing; according to the online finding aid, they mostly originate from Miller’s overflowing attempts to write an essay on English novelist D. H. Lawrence.

In her biography of Miller, Mary Dearborn details how the D. H. Lawrence project, or “the Brochure” as it was initially called, developed as Miller was attempting to publish Tropic of Cancer in 1932. The only publisher whose attention he managed to get was Jack Kahane of Obelisk Press, who had misgivings about publishing the controversial contents of Tropic. Thus, Miller was asked to compose an essay on Lawrence in order to assert himself as an intellectual and gain more credibility. [1] The project was eventually published as The World of Lawrence: A Passionate Appreciation, much later in 1980.

I discovered that very little of the Miller manuscripts at Spencer Library actually appear in any published form. The most perplexing was “Self-Portrait,” a four-part piece that is largely devoid of any connection to the D. H. Lawrence essay, especially in its earlier sections. Within it, Miller mentions the “Universe of Death,” a chapter within The World of Lawrence and The Cosmological Eye (1939). Yet, it bears little resemblance to the section as it appears in the book. Similarly, there is a short description of the 1933 film “Extase,” which was likewise detailed in a chapter of the same name in The Cosmological Eye, yet its appearance within “Self-Portrait” is a different piece altogether. The more I read “Self-Portrait,” the more it appeared as a familiar part of Miller rather than a focused reflection on Lawrence (hence the title). The manuscript, framed around a walk through Paris during springtime, bears many hallmarks of Henry Miller’s original style, such as ornate, unconventional prose, descriptions of sordid and lurid elements lurking underneath the quotidian, a personification of Paris, dubious biographical details and nostalgic reminiscences on his earlier days in Brooklyn, musing on favorite authors (Proust and Dostoevsky), and a meandering, abstract form.

The fact that “Self-Portrait” presents itself as creative piece, rather than an analytical one, hints towards its eventual fate. Biographer Jay Martin details that, while Miller “originally regarded ‘Self-Portrait’ as a note to the ‘Universe of Death’ or a coda to ‘The World of Lawrence,’ he always planned it as a personal statement … [taking shape] by looking at himself, or portraying his experience, in a variety of ways.” [2] And Dearborn states that “Miller’s new book, tentatively called ‘Self-Portrait,’ … would eventually appear as Black Spring.” [1] This appears to be the definitive answer: “Self-Portrait,” written as a marginal addition to Miller’s project on D. H. Lawrence, became the premise for a new book entirely, and eventually grew into his collection Black Spring (1936). The process of researching Miller’s “Self-Portrait” emphasized one of the most rewarding aspects of my job here at Spencer Library: being able to uncover little-known parts of literary and cultural history.

Nile Russo
Public Services Student Assistant

[1] Dearborn, Mary V. The Happiest Man Alive: A Biography of Henry Miller. New York: Simon & Schuster, [1992]: 156-163. 

[2] Martin, Jay. Always Merry and Bright: The Life of Henry Miller: An Unauthorized Biography. Santa Barbara, Calif, London: Capra Press ; Sheldon Press, [1979]: 293f.

Special thanks to Special Collections Curator Elspeth Healey for directing me towards the Dearborn and Martin biographies of Henry Miller.

In my ten years working with Spencer collections, it’s been impossible not to notice the name William Stirling Maxwell printed on a wide variety of bookplates in our Special Collections. Maxwell was a Scottish art historian, scholar, art collector, and bibliophile, a portion of whose considerable book collection found its way to Spencer’s stacks in years past.

In a flurry of activity one afternoon last fall, I set out to document as many Stirling Maxwell plates as I could find. I located an impressive 35 unique designs in all, and it’s likely there are others out there, in Spencer’s collection and in the many collections around the world across which Stirling Maxwell’s library is dispersed.

To fit this selection of bookplates into this post, I’ve grouped them together into loose categories and adjusted their sizes. The actual plates range greatly in style and in size, from just a few centimeters long to covering the entire pastedown of a folio volume. I’ve grouped these images based on the more prominently featured design elements, although many of the same motifs are repeated across multiple plates, in particular Stirling Maxwell’s heraldic devices, monograms, and personal or family mottos. Some of the plates bear the name William Stirling, while others include Maxwell, which he added after succeeding the Maxwell Baronetcy in 1865.

It’s clear that Stirling Maxwell took pride in his book collection and derived enjoyment from them; in addition to their personalized bookplates, many of the Stirling Maxwell volumes in Spencer are in fine custom bindings bearing his coat of arms and extensive decoration (another blog post for another day!). I hope you will enjoy perusing this selection (A bevy of bookplates! An excess of ex libris!) as much as I did. Remember that these and all of Spencer’s collections can be viewed in person in our reading room!

Angela Andres
Special Collections Conservator

Charlton Hinman was a looker. Of course, that was true of so many of Fredson Bowers’ students – they tended to be lookers. We won’t make any comment on the relative attractiveness of Charlton Joseph Kadio Hinman or Bowers’ students, but we refer instead to the tradition of close examination and description of books that Bowers codified and Hinman continued here at the University of Kansas. On the north side of the Marilyn Stokstad Reading Room at Kenneth Spencer Research Library is the Hinman Collator, a hulking grey machine that stands as a reminder of (and a tool for) precisely that kind of work. Our colleague Caitlin Klepper wrote a post about the collator previously, but we thought we might delve more in-depth here.

Modern descriptive bibliography – the close physical examination and description of books – begins with Fredson Bowers’ book Principles of Bibliographical Description (1949). Bowers was a professor of English at the University of Virginia, and Charlton Hinman was Bowers’ first PhD student there. Both Hinman and Bowers had analytical minds with similar bents, which served them well in the Second World War. They were involved in cryptography and code breaking, with Bowers again leading Hinman as his commanding officer. Following their service, Bowers returned to Virginia, publishing the aforementioned Principles.

Hinman’s dissertation, The Printing of the First Quarto of Othello, led to his first position as a research fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library, where he collated copies of the first folio of Othello. It was Hinman’s time as a fellow at the Folger that inspired his creation of the collation machine. Collation – or, the work of examining and describing the physical evidence in a copy of a book – is time consuming. Hinman’s work was even more intensive, as he sought to find all of the different states of the pages down to the most minor corrections or insertions made by the printer in the course of printing the book. Looking at each page of text line by line is an almost impossible task. Hinman hints at this problem in his preliminary essay about the machine, which was titled “Mechanized Collation: A Preliminary Report” and printed in the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America in 1947.

Hinman’s time in the military helped point the way to a solution, supposedly through military reconnaissance use of photography. He described the idea of taking two pictures of the same area and rapidly alternating them to spot differences. He didn’t claim he had done it as part of his cryptography work; rather, he claimed he heard about it while in the military. However, the process Hinman described was never used for reconnaissance purposes. While the military did use aerial photography, they didn’t use any method that alternated two images in a similar way to the function of the Collator. In his article “‘The Eternal Verities Verified’: Charlton Hinman and the Roots of Mechanical Collation” (Studies in Bibliography, 2000), Steven Escar Smith writes that “using World War II technology, it simply would not have been possible to photograph the same patch of ground twice from exactly the same altitude and position.” According to Smith, Hinman seems to have acknowledged that the story wasn’t entirely true, but it’s not clear whether he actually discouraged its telling.

Arthur M. Johnson, Hinman’s partner who took over building and selling collators around 1956, may have been the one to accurately describe how Hinman got the idea for the collator. Johnson wrote that Hinman had studied something that Johnson called an “astronomer’s microscope.” It used the same principle of “blink comparison” to compare images of the night sky, most famously by Kansan (and KU alumnus) Clyde W. Tombaugh in his observation of Pluto. Although it’s not known whether Hinman ever saw or used a blink comparator, he knew of the one at the observatory at UVA when he was a PhD student there. This was the true technological ancestor of Hinman’s machine.

These kinds of devices are simpler than the Hinman Collator in that one can use flat images of similar size – not possible with books. Hinman’s great improvement and contribution, then, was the creation of a machine that could deal with books of different sizes, thicknesses, and even formats. Hinman had a long career as a professor of English, first at Johns Hopkins University (1945-1960) and then at the University of Kansas (1960-1975), where he eventually became a University Distinguished Professor of English. Approximately 50 collators survive. The collator at Spencer (A9 in Steven Escar Smith’s 2002 census of existing Hinman Collators, published in Studies in Bibliography) is one of two that remain that Hinman himself used; the other is at the Folger Library. The effect of the collator is reproduced in this short video by Sam Lemley. Bibliographer J.P. Ascher has also made a good video about how one might use the collator, utilizing the machine at the University of Virginia.

Hoping to actually use Spencer’s machine, we ventured to the Reading Room before opening. We powered it on, and, to our delight, the 400-pound machine came to life. Unfortunately, this was not to be, as we discovered that the “blink” feature, the key function, is not currently working. Thanks to the efforts of our colleague Molly Bauer, we are slowly learning what might be wrong and what the fix might be. Look for a follow-up post in the spring about our efforts, as well as digital alternatives to optical collation that bibliographers can use today.

The Hinman Collator, for now, stands as a testament to the ongoing work of descriptive an analytical bibliography here at the University of Kansas. Much like its creator, the machine is complicated and devoted to a very specific purpose – close looking at material objects we regularly take for granted.

Jason W. Dean and Adrienne Sanders
Rare Materials Cataloging Librarians

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.”