Kenneth Spencer Research Library

In my ten years working with Spencer collections, it’s been impossible not to notice the name William Stirling Maxwell printed on a wide variety of bookplates in our Special Collections. Maxwell was a Scottish art historian, scholar, art collector, and bibliophile, a portion of whose considerable book collection found its way to Spencer’s stacks in years past.

In a flurry of activity one afternoon last fall, I set out to document as many Stirling Maxwell plates as I could find. I located an impressive 35 unique designs in all, and it’s likely there are others out there, in Spencer’s collection and in the many collections around the world across which Stirling Maxwell’s library is dispersed.

To fit this selection of bookplates into this post, I’ve grouped them together into loose categories and adjusted their sizes. The actual plates range greatly in style and in size, from just a few centimeters long to covering the entire pastedown of a folio volume. I’ve grouped these images based on the more prominently featured design elements, although many of the same motifs are repeated across multiple plates, in particular Stirling Maxwell’s heraldic devices, monograms, and personal or family mottos. Some of the plates bear the name William Stirling, while others include Maxwell, which he added after succeeding the Maxwell Baronetcy in 1865.

It’s clear that Stirling Maxwell took pride in his book collection and derived enjoyment from them; in addition to their personalized bookplates, many of the Stirling Maxwell volumes in Spencer are in fine custom bindings bearing his coat of arms and extensive decoration (another blog post for another day!). I hope you will enjoy perusing this selection (A bevy of bookplates! An excess of ex libris!) as much as I did. Remember that these and all of Spencer’s collections can be viewed in person in our reading room!

Angela Andres
Special Collections Conservator

Charlton Hinman was a looker. Of course, that was true of so many of Fredson Bowers’ students – they tended to be lookers. We won’t make any comment on the relative attractiveness of Charlton Joseph Kadio Hinman or Bowers’ students, but we refer instead to the tradition of close examination and description of books that Bowers codified and Hinman continued here at the University of Kansas. On the north side of the Marilyn Stokstad Reading Room at Kenneth Spencer Research Library is the Hinman Collator, a hulking grey machine that stands as a reminder of (and a tool for) precisely that kind of work. Our colleague Caitlin Klepper wrote a post about the collator previously, but we thought we might delve more in-depth here.

Modern descriptive bibliography – the close physical examination and description of books – begins with Fredson Bowers’ book Principles of Bibliographical Description (1949). Bowers was a professor of English at the University of Virginia, and Charlton Hinman was Bowers’ first PhD student there. Both Hinman and Bowers had analytical minds with similar bents, which served them well in the Second World War. They were involved in cryptography and code breaking, with Bowers again leading Hinman as his commanding officer. Following their service, Bowers returned to Virginia, publishing the aforementioned Principles.

Hinman’s dissertation, The Printing of the First Quarto of Othello, led to his first position as a research fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library, where he collated copies of the first folio of Othello. It was Hinman’s time as a fellow at the Folger that inspired his creation of the collation machine. Collation – or, the work of examining and describing the physical evidence in a copy of a book – is time consuming. Hinman’s work was even more intensive, as he sought to find all of the different states of the pages down to the most minor corrections or insertions made by the printer in the course of printing the book. Looking at each page of text line by line is an almost impossible task. Hinman hints at this problem in his preliminary essay about the machine, which was titled “Mechanized Collation: A Preliminary Report” and printed in the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America in 1947.

Hinman’s time in the military helped point the way to a solution, supposedly through military reconnaissance use of photography. He described the idea of taking two pictures of the same area and rapidly alternating them to spot differences. He didn’t claim he had done it as part of his cryptography work; rather, he claimed he heard about it while in the military. However, the process Hinman described was never used for reconnaissance purposes. While the military did use aerial photography, they didn’t use any method that alternated two images in a similar way to the function of the Collator. In his article “‘The Eternal Verities Verified’: Charlton Hinman and the Roots of Mechanical Collation” (Studies in Bibliography, 2000), Steven Escar Smith writes that “using World War II technology, it simply would not have been possible to photograph the same patch of ground twice from exactly the same altitude and position.” According to Smith, Hinman seems to have acknowledged that the story wasn’t entirely true, but it’s not clear whether he actually discouraged its telling.

Arthur M. Johnson, Hinman’s partner who took over building and selling collators around 1956, may have been the one to accurately describe how Hinman got the idea for the collator. Johnson wrote that Hinman had studied something that Johnson called an “astronomer’s microscope.” It used the same principle of “blink comparison” to compare images of the night sky, most famously by Kansan (and KU alumnus) Clyde W. Tombaugh in his observation of Pluto. Although it’s not known whether Hinman ever saw or used a blink comparator, he knew of the one at the observatory at UVA when he was a PhD student there. This was the true technological ancestor of Hinman’s machine.

These kinds of devices are simpler than the Hinman Collator in that one can use flat images of similar size – not possible with books. Hinman’s great improvement and contribution, then, was the creation of a machine that could deal with books of different sizes, thicknesses, and even formats. Hinman had a long career as a professor of English, first at Johns Hopkins University (1945-1960) and then at the University of Kansas (1960-1975), where he eventually became a University Distinguished Professor of English. Approximately 50 collators survive. The collator at Spencer (A9 in Steven Escar Smith’s 2002 census of existing Hinman Collators, published in Studies in Bibliography) is one of two that remain that Hinman himself used; the other is at the Folger Library. The effect of the collator is reproduced in this short video by Sam Lemley. Bibliographer J.P. Ascher has also made a good video about how one might use the collator, utilizing the machine at the University of Virginia.

Hoping to actually use Spencer’s machine, we ventured to the Reading Room before opening. We powered it on, and, to our delight, the 400-pound machine came to life. Unfortunately, this was not to be, as we discovered that the “blink” feature, the key function, is not currently working. Thanks to the efforts of our colleague Molly Bauer, we are slowly learning what might be wrong and what the fix might be. Look for a follow-up post in the spring about our efforts, as well as digital alternatives to optical collation that bibliographers can use today.

The Hinman Collator, for now, stands as a testament to the ongoing work of descriptive an analytical bibliography here at the University of Kansas. Much like its creator, the machine is complicated and devoted to a very specific purpose – close looking at material objects we regularly take for granted.

Jason W. Dean and Adrienne Sanders
Rare Materials Cataloging Librarians

What makes a monster, well, monstrous? Monsters carry the fears of the people that create them, tapping into existential dreads and cultural tensions to flay our superficial defenses and expose the weak societal organs and vulnerabilities beneath. Today, our monsters array from the cannibalistic and supernatural vampires of Sinners to Barbarian’s brutal, lonesome and pitiable Mother – and the movie’s true monster, a landlord. 

In the later Middle Ages, however, monsters sometimes played a more ambivalent role than violent antagonists. The word “monster” derives from the Latin “monēre” or “to warn, to admonish.” These monsters embodied omens or manifested God’s admonishment of human behavior, inviting conscious and deliberate analysis and contemplation on their meanings. So-called “monstrous races” were born from tales and anecdotes of human and human-like peoples born in far-off lands, repurposing anecdotal entrails from the Bible and classical authors like Pliny the Elder into haruspices of divine interpretation. They were frequent subjects of fascination and debate for their meanings, paired with prodigies and marvels as the myriad ways that God’s will manifested in nature and the real world, as well as theological debates as to whether such races possessed souls and could be converted to Christianity. 

Konrad Lykosthenes was one such interpreter, a humanist and encyclopedist who sought to sew together a comprehensive history of signs, prodigies, and portents from biblical times into his own modernity with his Prodigiorum ac ostentorvm chronicon [Chronicle of Prodigies and Signs]. He built a body of text from the limbs of other historical and contemporary sources onto which he sutured his own interpretations. These portents included everything from natural disasters like earthquakes to the appearance of mythical and monstrous creatures, as well as so-called “wonders,” “marvels,” and “monstrous” births. His work proved sensationalist and popular, a theological treatise that leaned lurid and sometimes traded on the grisly and gruesome to appeal to a wider audience. 

By the end of the sixteenth century, science and medicine had pierced their talons into the tender underbelly of the study of monstrosities, clawing it away from the sole purview of priests, philosophers, and theologians. With that shift, natural historians like Ulisse Aldrovandi and physicians like Fortunio Liceti dissected the meanings of monstrosities not as reflections of divine will or intent, but as natural phenomena that could be classified and analyzed under the newly invented microscope. 

Ulisse Aldrovandi sought to document all forms of nature, collecting a cabinet of curiosity with over 7,000 specimens – including an alleged and infamous dragon, likely fabricated by grafting together the stuffed carcasses of other animals. From those studies and collections he wrote over 400 volumes on everything from mollusks to metals. Monsters were a natural inclusion, and thus was wrought his Monstrorum Historia, the eleventh of a fourteen-volume encyclopedia. It bled together what we today treat as unequivocally monstrous creatures – centaurs and satyrs – with concepts that today we might conceive as mere medical conditions, such as neurofibromatosis or hypertrichosis, transplanting alien viscera of exotic monstrosity into the hollow body cavity of the reader’s imagination and understanding of nature. Aldrovandi’s amalgamation of monstrous creatures, humans, and hybrids reflected an ambition to reflect a complete and total natural history of monsters in parallel to birds, fish, and all of the natural world, rather than flensing the impossible from the plausible like extraneous fat from muscle and meat. 

In De Monstrorum causibus [On the Causes of Monsters], Fortunio Liceti, meanwhile, purported to analyze monsters not only as a phenomena born from nature – or “nature’s mistakes” or even its jokes and pranks – rather than divine will, but also sought their causes and their taxonomic classifications a landmark in teratology – the study of monsters which today has come to mean the study of congenital birth defects. The modern conflation is no accident, as Liceti’s work treats them as one and the same: monsters were born, not made, and his work discusses everything from dog-headed humans to conjoined twins, framed in antithesis to the ideal or perfect human body that was increasingly the focus of medical study.  

Liceti described monsters not as warnings or admonishments but as “showings,” claiming that the term derived from “monstrare,” or “to demonstrate or show.” His examination of “monsters” demystified them and challenged the portentous interpretations of monstrosities that deemed them a reflection of the wrath of God upon the parent or their community writ large. This metamorphosed monstrosities into something not inherently ominous or harrowing but still oozing with interpretations. 

As we examine historical horrors, it invites a vivisection of our own insecurities and fears, to peel back the flesh of our society and examine the sinews beneath that tie together our own identities: What do we think of as monstrous, and why? When does humanity itself become monstrous? And when something goes bump in the night, what are we really afraid of? 

All of above books will be on display at this year’s Haunting Humanities event this Wednesday, October 29th, 5:30 to 9pm at Abe and Jake’s Landing (800 E. 6th Street), together with an array of horrifying, prodigious, and compelling activities, including a monstrously-themed escape room in a box, coloring pages, Rare Book Bingo, monster reviews, and more. Come contemplate the meanings of monstrosity with us and walk away with your own nightmares to divine. 

Eve Wolynes
Special Collections Curator

In the course of my work as a conservator at KU Libraries, one of my favorite bookbinding features to spot “in the wild” is paste paper. A book covered in paste paper might come to the lab for treatment, or I might catch sight of one while working in the stacks, and I always take a moment to look at them closely and enjoy the variety of colors, patterns, and styles that paste papers come in. It was no easy task to narrow down Spencer’s abundant selection of paste papers to just a few volumes that will be on view in a temporary exhibit in the North Gallery through August and September.

Paste paper is a style of decorative paper made by coating the surface of paper with a thick pigmented starch adhesive (usually wheat paste or methylcellulose) and then manipulating the wet paste mixture to create patterns. Combs, stamps, brushes, wadded paper or textiles, rollers, fingers and more could be used to create designs. Paste papers were an economical alternative to marbled papers, which required a high degree of skill and costly materials to produce. No special training or supplies were needed to make paste papers; bookbinders could create them right in their workshops with materials already at hand. 

Paste papers were most often used for book covers and endpapers and were popular from the late 16^th through the 18^th century. Paste papers are often seen on books from Germany and Northern Europe, although there are many lovely examples of block-printed paste papers from Italy. There was renewed interest in paste papers during the Arts & Crafts movement of the late 19^th and early 20^th century. Today, paste papers are still created by book artists and hobbyists, and can be seen on some fine-press editions. The examples on view represent just a fraction of the many beautiful paste papers found in Spencer’s collections and available to view in the Reading Room.

Pulled (or veined) paste papers were created by coating two sheets of paper with the colored paste, pressing the two pasted sides together, and then pulling the sheets apart, creating a unique wave-like pattern on each sheet.

Drawn paste papers (also called scraped or combed) were made by “fingerpainting” in the wet paste or dragging various implements through the paste layer. The results can range from painterly and whimsical to clean and graphic. A faux wood graining tool was used to create the pattern on Summerfield E156 (second from left).

These are two very different examples of daubed paste papers: a boldly colored design executed in a thick layer of paste, and a subtle pattern possibly created with stiff brush bristles.

This charming stamped (or printed) design appears, appropriately, on the cover of a book about decorative papers used in bookbinding. An assortment of stamps in architectural shapes were pressed into the paste to create the pattern. Spattered (or sprinkled) papers were made by loading a brush with the colored paste mixture and striking the brush while holding it above the paper, creating a shower of drops.

Block printed paste papers used a matrix, probably carved as for a woodblock print, that was “inked” with the colored paste and stamped onto the paper. These designs can be simple or ornate and often use multiple colors. On Summerfield C1300 (at left) the binder used block printed papers in two different patterns.

In these examples the makers have used a combination of techniques on a single sheet: stamped over drawn, drawn over pulled, and so on. D2763 (at right) is also an example of a paste paper created using a colored sheet of paper, instead of white or light paper, as the starting point.

In Conservation Services we sometimes make paste papers to use in our own bookbinding models or in book making activities for colleagues or the public. Making paste papers is a fun and messy activity that invites exploration of colors, patterns, and mark-making tools. There are many online tutorials for making paste papers at home; bookbinder Erin Fletcher has a great video and written instructions on her blog. Tutorial // Paste Papers – Flash of the Hand

For more on paste papers, see Head of Conservation Services Whitney Baker’s 2012 blog post: Kenneth Spencer Research Library Blog » Historic Fingerpainting Seems More Dignified.

Angela Andres, special collections conservator

This post was written Public Services student assistant Kit Cavazos as part of their summer internship supervised by KU English Professor Misty Schieberle and Special Collections Curator Eve Wolynes.

Although medieval manuscripts are well-known for their look and style, the act of actually reading and understanding one can be tough. The image that often comes to mind is that of their non-naturalistic drawings, and thus, a casual viewer may see the squiggles sprinkled across the text as another odd decoration. However, many serve specific and intentional functions, acting as contractions, substitutions, or abbreviations of words or parts of words. Scribes often chose this practice because it saved on ink and parchment space, since both these materials were quite expensive.

The first and most prominent thing to note about manuscript notation is the dashes that are most often placed over vowels. Most of the time, these indicate a missing letter N or M. For example, “terram” shortens to “terrā.” The page above has quite a few examples in the first line: “qua[m],” “lapide[m],” and “lapide[m].”

Dashes can often have other meanings when interacting with a consonant, either by hovering above or crossing the letter. The incipit line of the above page has a quite recognizable first word, which substitutes an I for a J. This letter difference is generally because Latin, as a language, does not use the letter J, meaning our first word is “Judea.” Thus it is easier to understand part of the next noun, which has a letter L with a dash intersecting it, with the result resembling a stylized letter T. Picking out when a letter is a T or an L is made easy by way of comparison, as the page’s script will always have a style that differentiates letter that could be confused.

Thus, this L with an intersecting dash in the spine could represent a few similar letter clumps: “ler…,” “…ul,” “lor…,” or “al…,” among others. Despite knowing exactly what variations the letter could stand for, it still introduces a new wrinkle into the fold, as none of the suggested meanings for the substitutions seem to make the word wholly understandable. “Jerlerm,” “Jerulm,” “Jerlorm,” and “Jeralm” are not proper words, and thus, the contraction demonstrates how common words (such as proper nouns) could have more of an abstract contraction. When examining this word in context, it might be a bit easier to understand that this contraction represents the city named “Jerusalem.”

Another common symbol is this: , which often represents a “rum,” “ram,  or “rem” sort of ending. The above example has multiple instances of its use within the first line, all taking the first possible ending. The line, when uncontracted, would read “verbi salutaris ac miraculorum suorum dulcidine” (“by the sweetness of his saving word and miracles”). These textual changes – both contractions and substitutions – indicate that both scribes and readers needed to have not only a deep understanding of what each symbol represented, but also a sense of the language. You could either look at the Latin and parse some words, or you could understand how to complete the words but have their meaning completely lost on you. This afforded the literate members of the population some form of exclusivity from everyone else. These manuscripts often contain important information about plants, animals, or other general encyclopedic knowledge.

Another important aspect of a manuscript is additions that enhance a reader’s understanding of the text. The most obvious would be the fingers pointing to specific lines. These are manicules, and they are meant to emphasize important parts of the text. Another detail does something similar on the above page. The red lines highlighting specific letters are forms of rubrication, and they have a very similar function to manicules. In this instance, they mean to indicate and emphasize the capital letters in the line.

In other instances, rubrication notates significant parts of the text and frequently has a moralizing meaning. This means it can also come in textual form – often called the rubric – and it can add, emphasize, or reiterate important information to the reader. The term rubrication comes from the Latin word “ruber” (“red”), but important elements to a manuscript are not restricted solely to one color. Red often sees the most use, but blue and occasionally green can also be used for emphasis or decoration.

With these basic understandings of common aspects of a medieval text (at least within the Spencer collection), reading a manuscript for the first time may be less daunting. The above page, for example, has several features already discussed. Most prominently, the rubrication stands out from the rest of the content, especially in the rubricated initial letters A and I, which have blue decoration that appears to mimic a lace design. The first rubricated word of the text is in the incipit line, which has the same L with an intersecting dash as before. Thus, we know the word would be something like “pp[ul]m” or something similar. If you don’t have a book on contractions easily to hand, sometimes sounding out what letters you do have can help make sense of the word – “populum,” in this instance. Thus, reading through the incipit line, it would say something like “Absol[v]e q[uaesumu]s D[omine] p[o]p[u]l[um] n[ostr]o[rum] vincula peccato[rum]” (“we beseech you, O Lord, to absolve our people from the bonds of their sins”). From even just this first line, we can understand that the reader is meant to focus on the people or population about whom it is speaking.

Reading through a medieval text can be difficult; even just reading one line without translation can take hours, depending on how many contractions or abbreviations there are, as well as how obscure each one may be. The result, though, is quite often rewarding, as it means modern readers can understand how information was relayed and what information medieval writers saw as needing to be relayed. An online resource for information on specific abbreviations is Cappelli’s Latin Abbreviations, which has been incredibly helpful for research and compiling the transcription of these lines.

Kit Cavazos
Public Services student assistant