Kenneth Spencer Research Library

Student Manuscripts Processor and Museum Studies Graduate Student Sarah Adams revises her ideas about the nineteenth century after working on the collection of British poet L. E. L.

When we think of English society in the nineteenth century, we often associate it with what we’ve read in classic novels. British literature and culture of that era seemed to me to lean heavily on polite social decorum and chaste modesty. With such stringent moral codes, people from these periods can at times appear dull compared to modern society. However, after working on a certain nineteenth-century collection in the processing department, I have a hard time believing this to be the case.

Two portraits of Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L. E. L.). Left: by S. Wright del; S. Freeman sc.; Right: by D. Maclise ; J. Thomson. Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L. E. L.) Collection. Call Numbers: MS 223 E1 (left) and MS 223 E2 (right). Click images to enlarge.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802-1838), or L.E.L., was an English poet and novelist in the early nineteenth century.  She was controversial in her time due to rumored inappropriate relations with a man, a broken engagement, and her suspicious death (perhaps by suicide). Her small collection at the Spencer Research Library (MS 223) includes some of her poetry as well as personal correspondence. In her letters, L.E.L. displays a certain frankness that I was surprised to see in that time period. She could be quite harsh on those she felt were unexciting or uninspired.

In one passage from a letter to Mrs. E. Lytton Bulwer [1834?], she said this of her cousin Caroline:
“My cousins have all good constitutions, complexions, and tempers. They have always lived surrounded with every comfort and have ideas as regular as the lines in a copy book. They hold rouge to be endangering your immortal soul, the opera as sinful, and theaters the downright profession of the devil. In short, Caroline’s idea of London, where she spent a few weeks after their bridal excursion, is that of the whole set, my that ‘it is a great, wicked, expensive place.’”

In another passage, she writes regarding her cousins’ ideas of recreation:
“I have no taste for innocent pleasures.”

 Detail from the first page a letter from L. E. L. to Mrs. Bulwer.  Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L. E. L.) Collection.
Call Number: MS 223 Bc2.  Click image to enlarge

And further:
“One of my little cousins has a gold chain to which she attached at least as much the idea of dignity as of vanity. Her younger sister first implored her to give it – no – then to lend it. The negative nod even more decided. At last the petition became a ‘farther looking hope’ and she exclaimed, ‘Will you Annie leave it me in your will?’ ‘No,’ replied the cautious Miss Annie, ‘I shall want it to wear in Heaven.’”

This attitude toward her cousins likens L.E.L. to one of the many “villains” of Victorian literature. Perhaps, though, there was another side to nineteenth-century English society that some modern readers choose to ignore in the interest of romantic ideals we’ve grown to love in our favorite classics.  I, for one, find it much more exciting to imagine this slightly wicked side in our beloved heroes and heroines.

Curious about L.E.L.’s work? Click here for a link to one of her poems, “Revenge.”

To read the entirety of the letter from  L. E. L. to Mrs. E. Lytton Bulwer discussed in this post (MS 223: Bc.2), please click on the thumbnails below.

Sarah Adams
Student Manuscripts Processor and Museum Studies Graduate Student

Editor’s Note: An online finding aid for the Spencer Library’s Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L. E. L.) Collection will be available through our finding aids search portal in the coming weeks.

This Sunday, November 11, is Veterans Day, and in honor of this we thought we would highlight a recent acquisition:  a group of letters that record one soldier’s World War I experiences in Europe.  The letters were written during 1915-1919  by Hector C. Henderson, who served as a private (later promoted to corporal) in the 1^st Wellington Company, New Zealand Expeditionary Force.  Henderson, who was then in his early 30s, was writing to an American pen pal, Mae Josephine Gillette (born in about 1890),  who lived in Winsted, Connecticut. Henderson, who may have come from Australia (in June 1889 The Traralgon Record, Victoria, mentions a Hector C. Henderson, jun.), had worked as a railroad telegraph operator and clerk in New Zealand before the war. Writing first from New Zealand and later from England, France and Germany, Henderson filled 41 letters (237 pages) and 2 postcards with his observations about the horrors of  World War I.

Pen pals during World War I:  (top) Hector C. Henderson of New Zealand (figure on right by “x”) and
(bottom) Mae Josephine Gillette of Winsted, CT.  Henderson-Gillette World War I Collection.
(Recent Acquisition–call number to be assigned). Click to enlarge.

The first letter, sent from New Zealand in 1915, is written in shorthand (Gregg method). Henderson and Gillette had probably become acquainted through the Gregg shorthand pen-pal club that Henderson had joined in 1913 (The Gregg Writer, vol. 15:1912-1913). A 1916 letter cautions that shorthand letters won’t pass military censorship. The rest of the correspondence, written in pen or pencil on a variety of papers, is in ordinary cursive script. By 1918 Henderson reported that he was sick of war: “Saw a couple of Hun planes brought down…One of them was in flames when falling…this continual bombardment gets on my nerves…I’m writing this in my dug out & shells are screeching overhead. God how I wish it were all over.” In November 1918, the month when the war ended, he mentions his engagement to an English girl, and the correspondence ends in 1919. Hector’s letters must have been kept by Mae. A group of family photographs show Mae as an infant (1891), girl (age 12), and young woman (once with her parents and once alone). She may later have married Benjamin J. Wood of Millinocket, Maine, whose photograph is in the collection, along with a photograph of 2-year-old Mae Gillette Wood (their daughter?) holding a teddy bear.

Left:  The first letter in the collection, a letter from Hector Henderson to Mae Gillette in shorthand (Gregg Method).
Right: A letter from Henderson to Gillette explaining that he can no longer write in shorthand since it won’t pass the
military censor.  Henderson-Gillette World War I Collection.(Recent Acquisition–call number to be assigned).
Click images to enlarge to legible size.

Karen S. Cook
Special Collections Librarian

In honor of the upcoming presidential election, we focus today on one form of political advertisement: the bumper sticker. First produced in the 1940s, mostly likely by Kansas City, Kansas screenprinter Forest P. Gill, bumper stickers gained prominence in the early 1950s to advertise tourist attractions, public safety initiatives, political campaigns, radio and television stations, and political and personal viewpoints. As ephemeral artifacts broadcasting historical and social events and trends, bumper stickers are widely collected by museums, archives, and libraries.

Spencer Research Library is fortunate to have a substantive collection of bumper stickers in the Kansas Collection, as part of the Wilcox Collection of Contemporary Political Movements. This world-class collection was (and continues to be) shaped by Laird Wilcox, a former KU student and expert on right- and left-wing political groups from the early 1960s to the present.

For more information about the history of bumper stickers, see “Soapbox for the Automobile: Bumper sticker history, identification, and preservation”

Bumper stickers spanning the political spectrum from the Wilcox Collection of Contemporary Political Movements.
Above the post text: Wilcox Sticker # 46, 17; below the post text: Wilcox Sticker # 165, 28,
39, 50, 81, 22, 71, 174,  42, 33, 64, 1, 180, 43, 27, 10, 83, 164. Click images to enlarge.

Whitney Baker
Head, Conservation Services

Public Services Student Assistant Eleni Roussopoulos writes of a favorite discovery from the stacks.

One day while re-shelving books in Spencer’s Special Collections book stacks my attention was caught by a navy-blue box on a lower shelf. Unable to walk away without knowing the contents of the box, I carefully opened it. Inside this box lives a three-volume set of hand-made books titled Sword and Blossom Poems from the Japanese Done into English Verse by Shotaro Kimura and Charlotte M.A. Peake,  [1908 – 1910].

The three volumes of Sword and Blossom Poems from the Japanese / done into English verse by Shotaro
Kimura & Charlotte M.A. Peake ; illustrated by Japanese artists. Tokyo: T. Hasegawa, Meiji 41 [1908-1910].
Call Number B3136.  Click image to enlarge.

Each volume features both “Sword” and “Blossom” poems, where the text is accompanied by woodcuts from various Japanese artists and is printed by woodblock (rather than by moveable type). The “Blossom Songs” are tanka (short unrhymed poems) translated from the Kokinshū anthology of Japanese poems compiled circa 905 C.E.

 “Blossom Songs” half title, with list of illustrations for the second volume;
“Snow,” with a reproduction of a Hiroshige snow scene, and “Misere” and “Maple Leaves,”
with illustration by Kohō, from the “Blossom Songs” section of the first volume of Sword and
Blossom Poems from the Japanese. Call Number B3136. Click images to enlarge.

The “Sword Songs” were composed in the Chinese style by various Japanese authors. In the introduction, the editor informs the reader that the “the spirit that breathes through [the sword songs] is the spirit that has animated the warriors of Japan from the earliest days.”

The “Sword Songs” section title page and “A Sword Dance of the Satsuma Clan, ” both with illustrations by Gesso, from
volume two of Sword and Blossom Poems from the Japanese.  Call Number B3136. Click images to enlarge.

These surprisingly sturdy hand-made books, with crepe-paper covered boards, were published in Tokyo by T. Hasegawa at the beginning of the twentieth century.  Gorgeous and fascinating to look at, these short books offer an excellent example of the now-vanishing art of Japanese wood-block printing.

Eleni Roussopolous
Public Services Student Assistant

One challenging thing about conducting research in a special collections library and archives is that you can’t “browse” the stacks as you might in a circulating collection.  There are plenty of fortuitous discoveries to be made at Spencer, but they don’t come from your eye alighting on the volume two books down from the one that you went to the shelf to retrieve.

However, thanks to a new functionality in the KU Libraries online catalog, there is now a way to “browse” some of the Spencer Library’s collections.  This exciting new functionality bears a descriptive–if technical-sounding–name:  the “left-anchored call number” search (see below for a screenshot).

The term “left-anchored” refers to the fact that the catalog will retrieve any items whose call numbers begin with the word or series of letters that you enter into the search box.  This is useful because many of the Spencer Library’s discrete collections (such as the William Butler Yeats Collection or the Wilcox Collection of Contemporary Political Movements) have distinctive call numbers that begin with a common word or series of letters.  For example, all items in the named Yeats collection have call numbers that begin with “Yeats,” and all items in the Wilcox Collection have call numbers that begin with “RH WL” (or, even more specifically, the manuscripts that are in the Wilcox collection begin with the call number “RH WL MS” ).  Thus, if you enter those words or series of letters and select “Left-anchored call number”  from the search options, you will be able to “browse” the catalog records for the items in the collection.

You can then use the “sort results by” function (which is found at the top left of the results page) to sort the results by date (either earliest or most recent first), author, or title. 

Below is an example (with screenshots) to help illustrate this process.

Imagine you are interested in browsing printed materials in the Spencer Library’s Willliam J. Griffith Collection, a collection of books, newspapers, broadsheets, and printed ephemera focusing on Guatemala (and Central America more broadly) from the late eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century.  Since all call numbers for this collection begin with the word “Griffith,” you can pull up all of the online catalog records for that collection by conducting a left-anchored call number search for that term:

Then you can sort the results by date (earliest first) to browse by date.  (Note: this means that you’ll receive all of the records for undated materials first, followed by the dated materials in chronological order.)

There is a second handy use for the left-anchored call number search: it allows you to look up a Spencer Library item by its call number.  This can be helpful when you have jotted down a call number for an item, but you can’t remember its precise title.  Simply enter the full call number in the search box (e.g. RH D213), and then  select the left-anchored call number option.  In no time you’ll be looking at the record for RH D213, which turns out to be In Preparation–a standard history of Kansas and Kansans, written and compiled by William E. Connelley.

The left-anchored call number search isn’t the be-all and end-all for searching Spencer’s collections.  For example, it’s less helpful for working with non-discrete collections such as the general rare books collection or the general Kansas Collection holdings, and it doesn’t help you identify all of the books by a specific author or on a given subject since these may span several collections.  However, it does provide you with another helpful tool for navigating the Spencer Library’s  fascinating holdings.

Ready to start browsing discrete collections?  Listed below are several (though by no means all) of the Spencer Library’s distinctive call numbers.  To learn more about distinctive call numbers within the Kansas Collection, Special Collections, and the University Archives, please contact a staff member.

The Beginning String of Several Spencer Research Library Call Numbers
MS = Special Collections manuscript collections call numbers
RH MS = Kansas Collection manuscript collections call numbers
RH MS-P = Photographic materials in the Kansas Collection call numbers
RH Ser =Kansas Collection Serials and Periodicals call numbers
PP = Personal papers in the University Archives call numbers
RH WL= Wilcox Collection of Contemporary Political Movements call numbers [***]
Josephson = Josephson Collection call numbers  (collection of leftist political literature dating primarily from the first half of the twentieth century)
RH H-J = Haldeman-Julius collection  call numbers (Girard, Kansas publisher of  the “Little Blue Book” series of inexpensive books on subjects such as self-improvement, philosophy, religion, politics, humor, biography, music, literature, science, and sex education)
KAC = Kansas Authors Club collection call numbers
Summerfield = Summerfield Collection of Renaissance and Early Modern Books call numbers (printed works in Continental Europe from 1455 up through 1700)
O’Hegarty = P.S. O’Hegarty Colletion call numbers (Irish politics and literature and other printed works from the library of Irish nationalist P. S. O’Hegarty) [***]
Joyce = Spoerri Collection of James Joyce call numbers
18th Century =18th century British pamphlets call numbers (covering poetry, drama, prose, politics and economics, and religion)
Ellis Aves =Ellis Ornithology collection call numbers
ASF= American Science Fiction collection call numbers
UA = Faculty publications, University of Kansas Press publications, and other publications associated with the University Archives call numbers [***]

[***]   Please note that for collections that exceed 10,000 items in size (marked with three asterisks above), the left-anchored call number search will return only the first 10,000 items.

Elspeth Healey
Special Collections Librarian