Kenneth Spencer Research Library

Today is Election Day, so in the spirit of voting and civic engagement, we’re featuring a collection full to the brim with politicians.

Wayne Davis taught history and was a high school principal in Cherryvale, KS, before joining, in 1972, the History faculty at what is now Highland Community College. In addition to his busy day job, he maintained a side passion:  collecting signed photographs of US politicians and federal officials. His collection at Spencer Research Library (MS 189) consists of autographed pictures and brief letters from close to 260 public figures, collected between the late 1940s and the 1970s. Included are politicians like New York Member of Congress Bella Abzug (1920-1988), a feminist and civil rights advocate reintroduced to a new generation through the 2020 TV series, Mrs. America; Michigan Governor George Romney (1907-1995), who in 1968 ran for the Republican party nomination that Richard Nixon would eventually secure; and Massachusetts Member of Congress Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill, Jr. (1912-1994), who also served as Speaker of the House from January 1977 to January 1987.

 

Bella Abzug, Representative for New York ; George Romney, Michigan Governor; and Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill, Representative for Massachusetts. Wayne Davis Collection. Call #: MS 189, Box 1, Folder: Abzug, Box2, Folder: Romney and Folder: O’Neill . Please click images to enlarge. Bonus points to anyone who can read the faint blue ink of O’Neill’s inscription.

Davis would often annotate the back of the signed photographs with notes about the politician’s date of birth, political party, religion, and career, as seen on the signed photograph of Wyoming Senator Joseph C. O’Mahoney (1884-1962).   

 

“With cordial good wishes”: Inscribed photograph of Wyoming Senator, Joseph C. O’Mahoney, with Davis’s notes on O’Mahoney and his career. Wayne Davis Collection. Call #: MS 189, Box 2, Folder: O’Mahoney. Click images to enlarge.

Davis appears to have collected the majority of these by simply writing to the figure in question.  “My hobby is collecting autographed pictures of famous people,” he explained in a 1966 letter to former Montana Representative, Jeanette Rankin (1880-1973), “to be used both as a hobby and in my classroom work.” As a suffragist and the first woman elected to Congress (winning a House seat in 1916, and then again in 1940), Rankin would certainly have been a “get” for Davis’s collection. However, in this particular instance, he would have to be satisfied with just an autograph. “Sorry— I have no picture,” Rankin jots in reply along the side of his letter (below), before signing her name.  Although Rankin was 85 at the time Davis sent his request, she wasn’t entirely retired from politics. In fact, in 1968, she would lead the “Jeanette Rankin Brigade,” a march of women’s groups on Washington, DC to protest the Vietnam War. A committed pacifist, Rankin was the only member of Congress to vote against US participation in both World War I and World War II. Though Davis did not succeed with Rankin, his collection is a testament that many other politicians obliged his requests.

Davis also collected signed photographs for federal officials, and to a much smaller extent foreign dignitaries, heads of state, and public figures such as astronauts and entertainers. Supreme Court Justices Thurgood Marshall (1908-1993) and William H. Rehnquist (1924-2005) are both represented in the collection. Marshall’s signed photograph is accompanied by a brief note on his letterhead as Solicitor General of the United States. Dated June 27, 1967, it was sent to Davis shortly after his nomination to the Supreme Court (on June 13, 1967) but before his confirmation (on August 30, 1967).

  

Supreme Court Justices: Thurgood Marshall and William H. Rehnquist. Wayne Davis Collection. Call #: MS 189, Box 2, Folders Marshall and Rehnquist. Click images to enlarge. 

In the later years of his collecting, Davis also sent queries to several politicians, seeking their opinions on the “Mayaguez Incident” and President Ford’s 1974 pardon of Richard Nixon. Among those to respond on the issue of the pardon were Texas Representative Barbara Jordan (1936-1996) and Kansas Representative and Senator Robert J. Dole (1923- ).  Replying in February 1977, Dole (or an aide replying in his stead), wrote: “… I must say that at the time of the pardon, I was very distressed by the action taken by President Ford.  Although in retrospect, I now feel that it was necessary to put Watergate and all of its ramifications behind us so that the nation could move forward.”  He continued that he felt that Ford’s “controversial decision had an adverse effect on his chances in the recent campaign,” alluding to Ford’s loss to Jimmy Carter in the 1976 presidential election.

A lawyer by training, Representative Barbara Jordan served on the U.S. House Judiciary Committee as it considered articles of impeachment.  Her speech at the opening of the committee’s hearing is praised as one of the finest examples of American political oratory (you can read and watch it here). Though the committee approved articles of impeachment, Nixon resigned before the process advanced further in the House and the Senate. It is that unfinished process and a lawyer’s eye for legal detail that shapes Jordan’s reply to Davis.  “I did not feel the pardon was appropriate at that particular time,” she (or her aide) explained, “There were many questions regarding the whole Watergate affair which remain unanswered. Also, Mr. Nixon had not been indicted or convicted of any civil or criminal offenses.” Jordan’s reply to Davis, sent in August of 1976, came at a landmark moment. in her career.  A month earlier, she had made history as both the first woman and the first African American to give the keynote address at a Democratic National Convention

Wayne Davis’s collection offers a photo-friendly and slightly idiosyncratic glimpse into American politics, but it is just one of many potential points of entry for researchers. Spencer Library, for example, holds the papers of a number of Kansas politicians, from former Governors Robert Blackwell Docking and Robert F. Bennett, to former US Congresswoman Jan Meyers, to former Kansas State Senate and House Representative Billy Q. McCray, to name but a few. And Spencer Library’s Wilcox Collection of Contemporary Political Movements is one of the largest collections of US left and right wing literature in the country. 

We invite you to explore politics across our collections and—most importantly—to engage by casting your vote! Polls are open in Kansas until 7 p.m. today.

Elspeth Healey
Special Collections Librarian

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 34,800 images from KU’s University Archives and made them available online; be sure to check them out!

Election Day is less than a week away. If you haven’t done so already, be sure to get out and vote!

Caitlin Donnelly
Head of Public Services

Happy Halloween, readers! To help you celebrate, we’re sharing some spooky materials from volumes at Spencer Research Library. Get creative with a Frankenstein-themed MadLibs passage and enjoy coloring scenes of monsters, beasts, and mythical creatures. You can download printable PDFs of the images (the two below plus two others of sea monsters) and the FrankenLibs activity (which includes the original Frankenstein text).

Caitlin Donnelly
Head of Public Services

Go to the doctor click here. He or she will listen to you carefully, examine you, and write you a prescription. On the prescription, he or she will write the amount of medication you need for the course.

N. Kıvılcım Yavuz is conducting research on pre-1600 manuscripts at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library. Each month she will be writing about a manuscript she has worked with and the current KU Library catalog records will be updated in accordance with her findings. 

We have very little information about the past history of Kenneth Spencer Research Library MS C195. When, where and by whom it was made are unknown. This is not surprising; the origins of many medieval manuscripts are uncertain. Scholars utilize different evidence to determine the circumstances in which a manuscript was produced as well as its history since its production. The only hint about the past of MS C195 comes from  a note dated to 1841 glued onto the front pastedown according to which the manuscript previously belonged to the library of the Charterhouse of Montrieux (Chartreuse Notre-Dame de Montrieux) in Méounes-les-Montrieux in southeastern France. This Carthusian monastery that was originally built in 1137; yet even if MS C195 was in their library at some point, it does not mean that it was made there, although it could suggest the general region in which it was created.

MS C195 contains a copy of Petrus Riga’s Aurora, a verse commentary on the Bible. Also known as Peter Riga (approximately 1140–1209), Petrus was a canon of the Cathedral of Notre Dame of Reims and later a Canon Regular of the Order of St Augustine at St Denis, also in Reims, France. It is thought that the Aurora was written over a long period of time at the end of the twelfth century, between 1170 and 1200. The modern editor of the Aurora, Paul E. Beichner, argues that there were three different editions of the work, all by Petrus Riga, over this thirty-year period as well as two later redactions by Petrus’s disciple, Aegidius of Paris (also known as Egidius or Gilles de Paris, approximately 1160–1223/1224). The text as it is contained in MS C195 is a copy of the third edition of the Aurora except that the beginning is missing and it does not include the chapter titled “Recapitulationes.”

Identifying the text contained in a manuscript only takes us so far in terms of understanding and appreciating the book as an object. On the other hand, a detailed physical examination, although it will not provide all the answers about the origin of a manuscript, allows us to discover the circumstances in which the manuscript was produced and used. When it comes to understanding the history of a manuscript, codicology, the study of manuscripts as physical objects, is as vital as the study of the texts contained in the manuscripts. When we look at MS C195, the first thing to be noticed is that the manuscript is no longer in its original binding. The current binding, which is probably early modern, is leather over paper boards, with both of its covers and spine blind-tooled. That the manuscript was rebound at some point requires one to be more careful when conducting an examination of the bookblock as there might be alterations such as added leaves or reorganized gatherings that were introduced—both knowingly and unintentionally—during the rebinding.

MS C195 is a parchment manuscript. As we leaf through the manuscript, we see that some leaves are thicker than others, some have yellower tint than others, several leaves have holes and cuts, and dozens of stubs are visible in the gutters. Furthermore, there are at least a few leaves that are palimpsests, still bearing visible traces of former writing on them. The variety of thickness and color of the parchment may indicate that these were made of different animal skins or prepared at different times or in different ways. Holes and cuts in the parchment usually occur during the preparation of animal skins, especially when hair was being scraped off with a knife. The existence of stubs mean smaller, single parchment leaves were added or inserted into the gatherings instead of using bigger sheets of parchment (or, in some cases that the existing leaves were cut out). Taken together with the existence of palimpsests in the manuscript, these features all indicate that the manuscript was made at a time and a place in which the resources were limited and that the scribe (or the compiler) of the manuscript made use of whatever material was available. 

In most cases, the imperfections in the parchment in MS C195 are found in the margins. Other times, when it was not possible to arrange the leaves so that the holes and the cuts remained in the margins, the scribe worked around these defects to complete the text, as seen, for example, on folio 107v and folio 108v. As for the stubs visible in the manuscript, all of these seem to be additions of single leaves to the gatherings made by the scribe as part of the original design. As it stands, MS C195 consists of 233 parchment leaves arranged in 31 quires. There are some signs of rearrangement. For example, the first two leaves of the original second gathering (now the third quire) were dismembered and are missing, and the last two leaves of the same gathering were misbound (now the second quire). Nevertheless, most of the quires seem to be intact and in their original order.

Although it is not particularly complex, the collation of the manuscript displays the resourcefulness of the scribe. The collation formula of MS C195 is as follows:

1⁴ + 2⁴ (wants 1 and 2) + 3⁴ + 4⁸ (2 and 7 are singletons) + 5⁸ (2 and 7 are singletons) + 6¹⁰ (3 and 8 are singletons) + 7⁸ (3 and 6 are singletons) + 8⁸ (2 and 7 are singletons) + 9⁸ + 10¹⁰ +11¹² + 1 leaf after 10 + 12⁸ + 1 leaf after 3 + 13-14⁸ + 15⁶ + 1 leaf after 1 + 16⁸ + 17⁸ (5 and 7 are singletons) + 18⁸ (2 and 7 are singletons) + 19-20⁸ + 21⁸ (2 and 7 are singletons) + 22⁸ + 23⁸ (2 and 7 are singletons) + 24² + 1 leaf after 1 + 25-27⁸ + 28⁸ (2 and 7 are singletons) + 29⁸ (2 and 7 are singletons) + 30⁸ (2 and 7 are singletons) + 31⁴ (wants 4).

Even for the trained eye, such a collation formula might be intimidating. Furthermore, as detailed as this formula is, it still provides limited information as to the materiality of the manuscript and how the manuscript was actually put together. As it is seen in the collation formula, the majority of the quires are quaternions, that is, gatherings of 8 leaves which are usually made up of 4 folded sheets. In MS C195, however, 11 of the 22 quaternions are formed by putting together 3 folded sheets, which make up six conjoint leaves, and two single leaves. In the seventh quire, the third and the sixth leaves are singletons, and in the remaining 10 quires the second and the seventh leaves; but the arrangement of the leaves with respect to sewing are not always the same.

A visual representation of the collation of the manuscript provides more information as to the arrangement of the leaves in each quire. In the visualization, it is seen clearly that even though quires 4, 5 and 8 are formulated in the same way, the manner in which they appear in the manuscript is not the same. An interactive version of the full collation of MS C195 can be viewed on VisCodex. Part of Digital Tools for Manuscript Study developed by the University of Toronto Libraries Information Technology Services and the Old Books New Science Lab at the University of Toronto, VisCodex is a web application based on VisColl, a system for modelling and visualizing collations of manuscripts created by Dot Porter and Alberto Campagnolo.

Writing collation formulas or indeed creating visualizations for collations is not a recent development, but as it is the case here, digital tools dedicated to manuscript studies can help us understand the physicality of artefacts better and share our knowledge with wider audiences. There are several other codicological aspects of MS C195, such as ruling and pricking, that can be examined and visualized in a similar manner to its collation in order to see what kinds of patterns can be detected. Findings of these examinations in turn can enable scholars to compare MS C195 with similar manuscripts, and perhaps even one day to pinpoint its date and place of production.

The Kenneth Spencer Research Library purchased the manuscript from Bernard M. Rosenthal Inc. in January 1969, and it is available for consultation at the Library’s Marilyn Stokstad Reading Room when the library is open.

• Edition of Petrus Riga’s Aurora: Aurora: Petri Rigae Biblia Versificata. A Verse Commentary on the Bible. Ed. Paul E. Beichner. 2 vols. Publications in Mediaeval Studies 19. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1965.

N. Kıvılcım Yavuz
Ann Hyde Postdoctoral Researcher

Follow the account “Manuscripts &c.” on Twitter and Instagram for postings about manuscripts from the 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 34,800 images from KU’s University Archives and made them available online; be sure to check them out!

This week’s image is the first Jayhawk drawing to appear in print.

The Spencer Research Library exhibit “100 Years of the Jayhawk” notes that

KU student Daniel Henry “Hank” Maloy drew what became the first “signature” Jayhawk. In recollections of his college years, Maloy remembered that he first had the idea of drawing the Jayhawk as a bird in October of 1912 when he saw a stuffed chickenhawk in the Squires photography studio [in downtown Lawrence]. He went home and drew a long-legged Jayhawk with big, heavy shoes so that he “could administer more effective justice” towards athletic opponents.

The term Jayhawker has been associated with Kansas since the pre-Civil War era and eventually became the symbol for the University of Kansas. In 1886, the term Jayhawk was incorporated into [KU’s] world-famous college yell “Rock Chalk Jayhawk KU,” although it was not yet portrayed as a bird. In a pre-Maloy drawing in the 1908 Jayhawker yearbook, a rather prehistoric looking bird is perched on a goalpost heckled a miserable looking Missouri Tiger.

Caitlin Donnelly
Head of Public Services