Kenneth Spencer Research Library

Many a 20th century herpetologist credits his or her early interest in herpetology to the books of Raymond Ditmars. He published eight books on amphibians and reptiles for children and adults alike and, although many professionals consider him merely a popularizer and a showman, his scientific and public contributions to herpetology were substantial. When he was hired as Assistant Curator in charge of reptiles at the Bronx Zoo in 1899, his personal collection of reptiles formed the nucleus of the zoo’s collection. Later on in his career, he was active in developing techniques for curing reptile diseases, produced nature movies, created a clearing house for distribution of antivenins produced in Brazil, and co-founded an American antivenin institute. He was a popular lecturer as well.

Raymond Lee Ditmars. The Book of Prehistoric Animals, 1935. Ellis Omnia D50

Although this volume (and several others authored by Ditmars) is from the Ellis Collection of natural history, the Department of Special Collections also has a collection of children’s literature, more than 7,000 volumes from the late 18th to early 20th century, including lots of natural history. In fact, books for children, from a 16th-century gardening manual to 20th-century science fiction, turn up in almost all of our collections, and in them, herps abound.

Sally Haines
Rare Book Cataloger

Adapted from her Spencer Research Library exhibit and catalog, Slithy Toves: Illustrated Classic Herpetological Books at the University of Kansas in Pictures and Conversations

The herbal is a medical garden in book form–hence the titles Hortus Sanitatis and Gart der Gesundheit–and as such contains data on the appearance, gathering, preparation, and use of medicinal plants. Remedies from the animal and mineral kingdoms are often included as well. Although the works shown here are from the early part of the Golden Age of the Herbal (roughly 1470-1670), these practical manuals have been popular with scientist and non-scientist alike since antiquity, and a stroll through any bookstore today will attest to a resurgence of that popularity. The Department of Special Collections has a rich and growing garden of herbals spanning six centuries.

Left: Otto Brunfels, Herbarum vivae eicones, [1532], call number Summerfield E60 v.1. Right: Pedanius Dioscorides of Anazarbus, De medicinali materia, [1542], call number Summerfield D291 item 1. Click images to enlarge.

Left: Christovam da Costa, Trattato  . . . della historia, natura, et virtu delle droghe medicinali, 1585, call number Summerfield C1125. Right: Incipit Tractatus de virtutibus herbarum, [1509], call number Summerfield C2114. Click images to enlarge.

Adapted entry from the catalog for the exhibition, All that in this delightfull Gardin growes, Department of Special Collections, 1983
Sally Haines, Rare Book Cataloger

All Creeping Things: A History of Herpetological Illustration, Spencer Library’s newest exhibit, opened on May 14, 2015. Guided by Special Collections Librarian Karen Cook, students Megan Sims, Sydney Goldstein, and Ryan Ridder created and installed the exhibit for an exhibit planning and design course (MUSE 703). Whitney Baker, Head of Conservation Services at KU Libraries, Special Collections Librarian Sally Haines, and Caitlin Donnelly, Head of Public Services at Spencer, also assisted the students with their project.

The exhibit was developed in conjunction with the Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles conference being held at the University of Kansas in July and features herpetological illustrations from seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century books in Spencer Library’s Special Collections. Spencer has put on a few iterations of a similar exhibit for previous conferences. Each student had a unique perspective on their experience creating the exhibit.

Ryan Ridder

“One of our goals was to be distinct from Slithy Toves [a previous exhibit, by Sally Haines] and to present images that viewers familiar with that exhibition, and associated book, might not see as often. We ended up repeating a few irresistible images – the giant salamander, Agassiz’s turtles, and the famous frontispiece to Rössel von Rosenhof’s frog volume – but everything else you see is different. We thought touching on embryological illustrations would give our exhibit another unique slant.”

Megan Sims and Ryan Ridder installing books in the cases. Click image to enlarge.

Sydney Goldstein

“I found this class to be both an overwhelming and an incredibly eye-opening experience. Coming from a graphic design background I’ve never gone through the steps of curating an exhibition or working off the computer. It was fun to rummage through a variety of books to select illustrations, figuring out how they will fit in the cases, selecting wall graphics, and working in a group. The most rewarding part was applying our vinyl title graphic ourselves. Overall, a great experience!”

Megan, Sydney, and Ryan hanging the vinyl title graphic.

Megan Sims

“I have installed many exhibits according to specific designs from clients, but this was my first experience selecting objects, designing signs and labels, and fabricating book mounts and wall graphics for an exhibit. Both the physical process and communication were challenging at times, but seeing the finished product was very rewarding. I’m excited for the conference members and the Lawrence community to see this exhibit!”

Ryan Ridder, Sydney Goldstein, Megan Sims, and curator Karen Cook. Click image to enlarge.

All Creeping Things is free and open to the public through August 2015.

Megan Sims
Museum Studies Graduate Student

The first fruits (berries, botanically speaking) of these vines to be eaten in Europe were probably yellow varieties: “golden apples” the Italians called them. The Italians loved them, but the rest of the world needed more convincing of their merits because they were thought to be either poisonous or aphrodisiac “love apples”, not too surprising considering their resemblance to other dangerous members of the same plant family.

At any rate, as late as the nineteenth century in America Dr. George Washington Carver, interested in improving nutrition among the poor, got up on a stage and ate these in public in order to prove that they were not poisonous.

In the annals of medical mysteries there was a case involving one of these ‘berries’ that killed off some folks; mystery solved when it was discovered that its stems had been spliced to the stems of one of the poisonous members of the family, jimsonweed, not with any mal-intent (pun intended), apparently, just the desire for bigger, better, and juicier.

They should have waited; genetic engineers are now splicing away, but at the genetic level. But … caveat emptor:  in 1992, just prior to the mounting of the Haunted Forest exhibition in which this label originally appeared, the first President Bush announced that the government would allow the sale, without government testing – by 1993 – of the Flavr Savr, courtesy of Calgene, Inc. of Davis, California. Long story short, the experiment failed: rising costs prevented the company from becoming profitable, and the Flavr Savr was gone by 1997.

Have you guessed the identity of the fruit whose vine is pictured below?

The name of this common berry is… TOMATO (highlight the blank space to the left to reveal the plant’s name).

Our mystery berry: Solanum Lycopersicum. Johann Hieronymus Kniphof (1704-1763). Botanica in originali
seu Herbarum vivum. Hallae Magdeburgicae, 1757-1767.  Centur. 4, 1758. Linnaeana E15 Click image to enlarge.

This unusual-looking botany book is one of the earliest, if not the first work of any extent, to use the process known as nature printing, by which a plant is laid out flat, blackened with printer’s ink, and placed between two pieces of paper to which pressure is applied. The ink imparts an impression of veins and fibers which is then colored by hand. Like a number of the works shown in this exhibition, this is one of considerable bibliographical complexity and it exists in fewer than fifteen copies, not all of which are colored and no two appear to be alike. This herbarum vivum is notable for being perhaps the first botanical plate book to cite Linnaeus’s Species plantarum, 1753, in which binomials were first used consistently for naming plants.

Title page for Centur III-IV of Kniphof’s Botanica in originali seu Herbarum vivum.
Hallae Magdeburgicae, 1757-1767.   Linnaeana E15 Click image to enlarge.

Sally Haines
Rare Books Cataloger

Adapted from her Kenneth Spencer Research Library exhibit, The Haunted Forest: New World Plants & Animals (1992).

Linnnaeus (whose citation at the end of a binomial is simply “L.”) invented a practical system for the classification of plants and animals; more importantly, he established a uniform method of referring to species by two Latin words–a reform that led eventually to binomial nomenclature. Although his classification system was superseded, his principles of nomenclature continue to provide the rules for application of names to thousands of species of animals and plants newly identified every year. Volume 1, Animalia, of the tenth edition of the Systema Naturae (1758), is one of the most important books in the history of science, for it marks the beginning of the modern zoological nomenclature and systematics. In it, Linnaeus first consistently applied binomial nomenclature to the whole animal kingdom.

Image from Siren lacertina, 1766. Linneana B65 v.6:146, Special Collections

Unfortunately the great Linnaeus had little love for herps, thought them “disgusting,” and would have done well to adopt the classifcation system of John Ray. We quote, in rough translation, from the Systema: “Amphibia are loathsome because of their cool and colorless skin, cartilaginous skeleton, despicable appearance, evil eye, awful stench, harsh sound, filthy habitat, and deadly venom; and so God has not seen fit to create many of them.” Many of Linnaeus’s descriptions were based on those in books by Aldrovandus, Seba, Catesby, Jonstonus, and others. His use of the word “Amphibia” denoted not only all reptiles and amphibians, but also the cartilaginous fishes.

This work is the doctoral dissertation of one of Linnaeus’s students; it was the tradition of the day for a professor to write the thesis, but the student “respondent” had to defend it and pay for its publication.

Sally Haines
Rare Books Cataloger
Adapted from her Spencer Research Library exhibit and catalog, Slithy Toves: Illustrated Classic Herpetological Books at the University of Kansas in Pictures and Conservations