Kenneth Spencer Research Library

This is the latest installment in a recurring series of posts introducing readers to the staff of Kenneth Spencer Research Library. Today’s profile features Eve Wolynes, who joined Spencer Research Library in June 2023 as an Assistant Librarian and a Special Collections Curator.

Eve Wolynes, Special Collections Curator, in Spencer Research Library’s reading room with MS E256. Click image to enlarge.

Where are you from?

I’ve hopped around a fair amount. I was born in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, and moved to San Diego when I was ten. As an adult, I’ve lived in Berkeley, Houston, South Bend (Indiana), and Dayton (Ohio) before finally making my way here.

What does your job at Spencer entail?

I’m a Special Collections Curator. While other curators and archivists at Spencer tend to have specific subjects, regions or materials they work with, Elspeth Healey and I cover everything in the Special Collections, which includes a huge range of materials — from Roman funerary stones, to medieval manuscripts, to modern poetry, science fiction and artists books, and spans the entire globe, from Guatemala to Italy to Japan. My responsibilities include collection development – helping to build the collection through purchasing new items and coordinating donations – as well as instruction with undergraduates, answering reference questions and supporting use of the items by researchers and users, and engaging with outreach through things like exhibit design and public events.

How did you come to work in libraries/archives/special collections?

As with so many stories, it began with a very sickly dog. While I was in grad school, working on my Ph.D. in medieval history, my dog had a health emergency and needed surgery, but I couldn’t afford to pay the vet bill on my graduate student stipend. To pay off the debt, I took on a job at my university’s library, and eventually moved into their Special Collections department when a position opened. Eventually I paid off the vet bill but realized I still wanted to work at the library; I felt like I had found a sense of community, that the work was a fun series of puzzles, challenges and mysteries, something different to learn every day. I started considering it seriously as a potential career direction. After I defended my dissertation straight into the pandemic, I took the shutdowns as a moment of contemplation to evaluate what I wanted to do; I decided to get my MLIS and to commit to Special Collections – and the minute I got back into a library I knew it was the right choice; I was at home again.

What is one of the most interesting items you’ve come across in Spencer’s collections?

Lately I’ve been enamored with MS E256, Hippiatria by Giordano Ruffo; it’s a veterinary text on medicine, anatomy and training for horses dating to the 13th century. The manuscript gives you a sense of the relationship people had with their animals over seven-hundred years ago, and how our relationships with horses have transformed over time. Plus, it has a very cute little sketch of a pony on the first page. Which is the best part, really.

I also just love all the medieval manuscripts; there’s a special kind of love, work and dedication that goes into producing an entire text by hand, visible in the meticulous (and sometimes not so meticulous) handwriting, in the very pages themselves. They’re so human, from the shape of their letters to the scratches and scribbles in the margins, as every word embodies the person who took pen to page.

A manuscript copy of Giordano Ruffo’s Hippiatria open to a leaf containing
a sketch of a pony. Italy, approximately 1290-1310. Call Number: MS E256. Click image to enlarge.

What part of your job do you like best?

I always love the strange and unique reference questions that lead me to fall down rabbit holes trying to hunt down an answer and make unexpected discoveries about materials in the collection; I love, too, when researchers and patrons can teach me something new in turn, or when I can help or watch them make a connection with the past – with their communities, cultures, experiences and memories, as embodied in the materials from our collections.

What are some of your favorite pastimes outside of work?

When I’m not living up the librarian life in the real world, I dabble in playing as a lore librarian in fantasy settings and video games like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous, along with smaller indie games like Scarlet Hollow, Pentiment (a game practically made for medievalists and librarians), and The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow.

What piece of advice would you offer a researcher walking into Spencer Research Library for the first time?

If you’re worried about looking like you don’t know what you’re doing, or what you’re talking about – we’ve all been there, even the librarians! My first time in a special collections library was terrifying and confusing, too. The only reason librarians make everything look old hat and obvious is because we’ve had years or even decades to learn the often-labyrinthine logic and secrets from behind the scenes. But because we know all the twists and turns of our library and collection, we’re the best people to help guide you through it!

Eve Wolynes
Special Collections Curator

Check the blog each Friday for a new “That’s Distinctive!” post. I created the series because I genuinely believe there is something in our collections for everyone, whether you’re writing a paper or just want to have a look. “That’s Distinctive!” will provide a more lighthearted glimpse into the diverse and unique materials at Spencer – including items that many people may not realize the library holds. If you have suggested topics for a future item feature or questions about the collections, feel free to leave a comment at the bottom of this page.

If you haven’t already, you might be starting to wonder just how obsessed I am with Spencer’s Tibbetts collections. The answer is VERY. This week on That’s Distinctive! I am sharing a third collection from John C. Tibbetts: his portraits collection. The finding aid mentions that “this collection consists of over 560 portraits of musicians, writers, actors, and other notable figures, in gouache and pen and ink, done by Tibbetts. Each portrait is signed or inscribed by its subject(s). Tibbetts painted hundreds of portraits of the subjects he interviewed during his time working in television and radio.” The Tibbetts portrait collection consists of twenty oversized boxes and one oversized folder. An article covering Tibbetts’ first accession to the library can be found in the Lawrence Journal-World.

This week we share Tibbetts’ portraits of Jim Carrey, Robin Williams, Sigourney Weaver, and Tim Burton. The collection houses signed portraits of many other well-known names and faces from Hollywood. Most portraits show individuals who were active in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Previous That’s Distinctive! posts have shared Tibbetts’ collection of Hollywood press kits and his collection of movie stills. More information on Dr. Tibbetts can also be found within those posts.

Tiffany McIntosh
Public Services

Check the blog each Friday for a new “That’s Distinctive!” post. I created the series because I genuinely believe there is something in our collections for everyone, whether you’re writing a paper or just want to have a look. “That’s Distinctive!” will provide a more lighthearted glimpse into the diverse and unique materials at Spencer – including items that many people may not realize the library holds. If you have suggested topics for a future item feature or questions about the collections, feel free to leave a comment at the bottom of this page.

This week on That’s Distinctive! we share The Encylopaedeia of Type Faces. Written by W. Turner Berry, A. F. Johnson, and W. Pincus Jaspert, the 358-page book was first published in 1953 and reissued in this revised and expanded edition in 1958. The book shares examples (or specimens) of typefaces.

According to Wikipedia, “A typeface (or font family) is a design of letters, numbers and other symbols, to be used in printing or for electronic display.” Many typefaces come with variations of size, weight, slope, and width. Each variation of a typeface (roman, italic, bold, etc.) might be considered a font, within the larger font family. A more in-depth discussion of typefaces and fonts can be found on Wikipedia.

The introduction of the volume explains its purpose:

“This selection of type faces has been compiled to provide a reference book for all those who use type — typographers, printers, publishers, advertisement designers and the business man who takes some interest in the choice of type for his stationery and publicity. It may also be of value to the lettering artist, the signwriter, and the engraver, who in consequence of the limitations of their own books of alphabets, often turn–we trust with a little uneasiness of conscience–to printers’ type for inspiration.”

I found this book simply by walking through the stacks, and I stopped because the title sounded interesting. Come to find out, the book is exactly what the title says. It shares hundreds of typefaces – organized into categories – throughout its pages, which is super fascinating. I’m sharing just a few pages this week, but the entire book can be viewed at the library.

Tiffany McIntosh
Public Services

A séance with L.E. James (Jim) Helyar, our late fellow librarian, and bibliographer of KU’s foundational Ralph N. Ellis collection of ornithology, is in order.

In our recent attempts to catalog mysterious heretofore unidentified bibliographical puzzlements in our Ellis collection backlog, we nailed the identity of a royal folio without a title page that had stymied Jim: he knew it was related to Alexander Wilson’s American Ornithology, but not how. Even though Jim was closer to solving this who-done-it than he knew, he wrote in notes left behind that “I don’t immediately see anything under Wilson or Bonaparte which corresponds.” “I suspect it’s something that ‘every [ornithological bibliographical] schoolboy knows’, but not me.”

Apparently, Jim was thrown off by the “Wilson/Bonaparte, American Ornithology” notes written at the bottom of the vulture plate shown below, so in fact who-done-it was not exactly who Jim thunk done-it. This messy (both physically and bibliographically) volume turned out to be an imperfect variant of one of our exceedingly rare ornithological tomes: the royal folio edition of Scottish naturalist Captain Thomas Brown’s Illustrations of the American Ornithology of Alexander Wilson and Charles Lucien Bonaparte, published in Edinburgh in 1835 (Call Number: Ellis Aves H76). This volume was created as an atlas to accompany a much earlier text, Alexander Wilson’s American Ornithology, first issued in Philadelphia between 1808 and 1814. In his notes Jim mentions Thomas Brown only as one of the artists credited for the “Wilson derived illustrations.”

I have created a small exhibition of the two copies, plus my start on what could be an arduous time-taking continent- and/or world-crossing project, to complete a census, not altogether do-able, ideally, entirely on-line or by phone. I was tempted at first to try the on-line and phone route, but same as with Jim perhaps … oh, the press of time …

The exhibit is free and open to the public in the North Gallery through September 16.

Sally Haines
Special Collections Cataloger

Check the blog each Friday for a new “That’s Distinctive!” post. I created the series because I genuinely believe there is something in our collections for everyone, whether you’re writing a paper or just want to have a look. “That’s Distinctive!” will provide a more lighthearted glimpse into the diverse and unique materials at Spencer – including items that many people may not realize the library holds. If you have suggested topics for a future item feature or questions about the collections, feel free to leave a comment at the bottom of this page.

This week on That’s Distinctive! we share a book from Spencer’s Children’s Book Collection, which is housed within Special Collections. The book, East of the Sun and West of the Moon: Old Tales from the North, was published in 1914. The book shares folklore from Norway and is illustrated by Kay Nielsen. Nielsen contributed twenty-five color and monotone plates to the book along with other printed images.

According to Wikipedia, Kay Nielsen (1886-1957) was a popular Danish illustrator in the early twentieth century. Nielsen illustrated works such as Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen, Other Stories by the Brothers Grimm, and Red Magic. In addition to these works, Nielsen contributed his artwork to Disney in works such as Fantasia. Unfortunately, Nielsen spent his final years in poverty. His last works were for local schools and churches in Los Angeles, California.

More of Nielsen’s work can be found on the Art Passions website, and more information on his background can be found on the website of the Society of Illustrators. A slightly different version of East of the Sun and West of the Moon, with the illustrations, is available online via Project Gutenberg.

Why this item? It gives a unique look into a children’s book with more than simple illustrations. The detail in the artwork alone is enough to draw a reader in. I recently brought my family in to Spencer for a tour and to show them several items from the collections. This book was one of those items and it really drew their attention.

Tiffany McIntosh
Public Services