Kenneth Spencer Research Library

Each week we’ll be posting a photograph from University Archives that shows a scene from KU’s past. We’ve also scanned more than 2,600 images from KU’s University Archives and made them available online; be sure to check them out!

Happy Lunar New Year! To learn more about this holiday, see the article “The Lunar New Year: Rituals and Legends,” published by the Asia for Educators initiative of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University.

Scenes from a KU Chinese New Year celebration or performance, 1994.
University Archives Photos. Call Number: RG 67/367 1994 Negatives:
Student Organizations: Chinese Student Association (Photos).
Click images to enlarge.

Caitlin Donnelly
Head of Public Services

Melissa Kleinschmidt, Megan Sims, and Abbey Ulrich
Public Services Student Assistants

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.

Each week we’ll be posting a photograph from University Archives that shows a scene from KU’s past. We’ve also scanned more than 1,700 images from KU’s University Archives and made them available online; be sure to check them out!

We’re sharing a bonus set of photographs this week, in honor of tomorrow’s holiday. Happy Valentine’s Day to all our readers, researchers, visitors, and friends!

Giving a Valentine’s Day heart, 1950s. University Archives Photos.
Call Number: RG 71/0 1950s Prints: Student Activities (Photos).
Click images to enlarge.

Caitlin Donnelly
Head of Public Services

Melissa Kleinschmidt, Megan Sims, and Abbey Ulrich
Public Services Student Assistants

Each week we’ll be posting a photograph from University Archives that shows a scene from KU’s past. We’ve also scanned more than 1,700 images from KU’s University Archives and made them available online; be sure to check them out!

We join others around the country in remembering legendary University of North Carolina basketball coach Dean Smith, who passed away at his home in Chapel Hill on February 7.

Portrait of Dean Smith as a member of the “Cage Team” (basketball
squad) in the Jayhawker yearbook, Winter 1953. University Archives.
Call Number: UA Ser 69/1 1953 Winter. Click image to enlarge.

Smith was an Emporia, Kansas, native who graduated from Topeka High School before attending the University of Kansas from 1949 to 1953, graduating with a Bachelor of Science in Education. During his time on KU’s varsity basketball squad, Smith played under Coach Phog Allen and was part of a team that won the national championship in 1952 and was an NCAA tournament finalist in 1953. Smith also played freshman football and varsity baseball while at KU, was a member of the Air Force ROTC detachment and the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity, and participated in K-Club and Sasnak.

Dean Smith (#22, far right) in a game against Nebraska State, 1952-1953. University Archives Photos.
Call Number: RG 66/13 Dean Smith: Athletic Department: Basketball: Players (Photos).
Click image to enlarge (redirect to Spencer’s digital collections).

Portrait of the basketball team after a game, 1953. Dean Smith is in the middle,
at Coach Phog Allen’s right shoulder. University Archives Photos.
Call Number: RG 66/13 Dean Smith: Athletic Department: Basketball: Players (Photos).
Click image to enlarge (redirect to Spencer’s digital collections).

Caitlin Donnelly
Head of Public Services

Melissa Kleinschmidt, Megan Sims, and Abbey Ulrich
Public Services Student Assistants

Tomorrow, February 12, marks Charles Darwin’s 206th birthday. To mark this anniversary, we’re sharing a letter that Darwin wrote to James E. Todd in April 1882. At the time, Todd was a professor of natural science at Tabor College, a Christian college in Tabor, Iowa, that operated from 1853 to 1927. He went on to teach geology at KU from 1907 until his death in 1922.

Letter, Charles Darwin to James E. Todd, 1882.
Call Number: MS C78. Click images to enlarge.

An article about this letter in Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science (Vol. 48, No. 3, December 1945) describes the circumstances in which it was written, although the author’s speculation that the document was “Darwin’s last letter” appears to be erroneous.

In April 1882, James E. Todd…published in the American Naturalist (volume 16, pages 281-287) a paper, “On the Flowers of Solanum Rostratum and Cassia Chamaecrista.” The paper soon came to the attention of Charles Darwin, then in his seventy-fourth year. Almost immediately Darwin wrote the letter to Professor Todd [shown here]…

The most extraordinary feature of the letter is its date, written nine days before Darwin’s death on April 19, 1882. Darwin had been in poor health for some time and beginning in December 1881 underwent a series of heart attacks. He rallied from these attacks and, as the letter indicates, by April was still mentally active and planning work for the future. Five days after writing the letter his final illness began…

Dr. Fritz Müller, referred to by Darwin in the letter [above], carried on an extensive correspondence with Darwin for many years, although the two naturalists never met (317).

Charles Darwin spent decades gathering evidence for evolution before publishing his groundbreaking book, On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection, in 1859. As demonstrated by his letter to Professor Todd, he remained active in scientific research until the end of his life.

Want to learn more about Charles Darwin? Spencer Research Library holds copies of many of his published writings, including a first edition copy of On the Origin of Species. You can find these sources by searching the KU Libraries online catalog. Spencer’s collections also contain two additional letters from Darwin; transcriptions of both documents are available online (letter to Emma Gärtner and Charles Lyell). As always, however, anyone interested in seeing these materials in their original physical form are welcome to do so at Spencer!

Digital copies of many sources by and about Darwin are also available; see the Darwin Correspondence Project and Darwin Online.

A transcription of Darwin’s letter to Professor Todd, also from the Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science article quoted above, follows.

April 10 1882.

Down,
Beckenham, Kent.
Railway Station
Orpington. S. E. R.

Dear Sir

I hope that you will excuse the liberty which as a stranger I take in begging a favor of you. I have read with unusual interest your very interesting paper in the American Naturalist on the structure of the flowers of Solanum rostratum, & I shd. [should] be grateful if you would send me some seed in a small box (telling me whether to plant in as annual, so that I may know when to sow the seeds), in order that I may have the pleasure of seeing the flowers & experimenting on them. But if you intend to experiment on them, of course you will not send me the seeds, as I shd. be very unwilling to interfere in any way with your work. I shd. also rather like to look at the flowers of Cassia chamaecrista.

Many years ago I tried some experiments in a remotely analogous case & this year am trying others. I described what I was doing to Dr. Fritz Müller (Blumenau, St. Catharina, Brazil) & he has told me that he believes that in certain plants producing 2 sets of anthers of a different colour, the bees collect the pollen from one of the sets alone. He wd. [would] therefore be much interested in your paper, if you have a spare copy that you could send him. I think, but my memory now often fails me, that he has published on the subject in Kosmos.

Hoping that you will excuse me, I remain, Dear Sir
Yours faithfully
Ch. Darwin

P. S. In my little book on the Fertilization of Orchids, you will find under Mormodes ignea, an account of a flower laterally asymmetrical, & what I think that I called right-handed or left-handed flowers.

Caitlin Donnelly
Head of Public Services