Kenneth Spencer Research Library

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

Robin Hood has long been a favorite research topic of mine, and upon arriving at Spencer I was interested to see what we have available. Within Special Collections, the offerings include 19th- and 20th-century printings of the iconic Howard Pyle The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (Call Number: Children C821), collections of extant ballads (Call Number: O’Hegarty A224), and even a time travel adventure by William Wu (Call Number: ASF B2119). While most of the library’s holdings are within the Children’s Collection, I was interested in looking at some of the oldest items.

The quest for the “real” Robin Hood is as never-ending as it is ambiguous; there are very few (if any) written records that would provide evidence for Robin Hood as a historical person. The legendary outlaw is, primarily, a legendary and even mythic figure, preserved in song and popular imagination throughout the centuries.

You may be familiar with A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode as being one of the oldest ballads relating to the titular outlaw. Several of the items here at Spencer feature Lytell Geste, which comprises either the entirety of the volume (Call Number: B2069) or includes it amongst a broader collection of ballads (Call Number: O’Hegarty A224). As I was looking through them, a few things stood out to me.

The oldest volume I looked at is a 1795 edition of Joseph Ritson’s volume Robin Hood: A Collection of All the Ancient Poems, Songs, and Ballads, Now Extant, Relative to that Celebrated English Outlaw (Call Number: C4323). The legend is largely credited to items recorded by either Wynken de Wode or William Copland, as you can see here in the introduction to Ritson’s recorded version of Lytell Geste.

While I had initially limited myself to looking at Lyttel Geste, and thought I might write primarily on the poem itself, I was immediately struck by the variance in prefatory materials between editions. Most notably, Ritson includes a detailed history of Robin Hood’s early life, as well as a family tree.

As you can see, Ritson’s accounting of the life of Robin Hood situates Robin as a member of the nobility, namely the Earl of Huntingdon. One might speculate on this rhetorical choice in light of contemporary events: Was there a need to firmly situate the image of the noble class as a champion of the common person in the wake of the American Revolution? We will likely never know, but Ritson’s scholarship on the subject gives us an interesting and valuable insight into ways in which the Robin Hood mythos has shifted over the years.

Indeed, every printing of Lyttel Geste that I looked at credits Ritson in some way. The volume at call number EPM X293 is an 1820 reprinting of Ritson’s seminal work, edited for younger readers and significantly shorter in length, and which also features a “family tree” of the Earl of Huntingdon.

The other major player in the printings I looked at is a scholar by the name of John Mathew Gutch, who reprinted Ritson’s Lyttel Geste text with some heavy revisions (Call Number: O’Hegarty A213). Gutch includes a version of Lyttel Geste that had been completely rewritten by the Rev. John Eagles, not only standardizing the spelling, but changing the language entirely.

Gutch casts some aspersions on Ritson’s scholarship and provides an overview of the scholarship to date. While Gutch does not broadly contest Ritson’s claim to Robin Hood’s nobility, he takes issue with a few key points of Ritson’s argument. Namely, Gutch stipulates that Robin Hood must have been of Saxon descent rather than Norman. Gutch draws out the distinction between Norman King Richard and Saxon Robin Hood, quoting from antiquarian and fellow scholar M. Thierry as well as delving etymologically into the origins of Robin’s surname.

While I can’t speculate on the utility of Gutch drawing out this particular narrative thread during his contemporary setting, I can say that it is a rich insight into possible interpretations of the story. There is general agreement that Robin Hood’s narrative fits best into the latter half of the 12th century, during the Princes’ Crusade, during which there is a noted divide between the French-speaking Norman aristocracy and the English-speaking common people.

The story of Robin Hood has long been mutable, with its various written forms being complemented or augmented by a rich oral history that is, for obvious reasons, unavailable to us here at Spencer. As Gutch says, “the surprising adventures of this chief of bandits of the twelfth century, his victories over the men of foreign race, his stratagems and escapes, were long the only stock of national history that a plain Englishman of those ages transmitted to his sons, after receiving it from his forefathers.” Robin Hood continues to fascinate and charm even outside of the era of his origin.

I had initially thought that limiting myself to comparing variations between versions of a singular poem would be a small enough scope for a blog post. As so often happens, I was mistaken. Even looking at just four items, I uncovered a wealth of information to dive into and a thousand threads of inquiry to follow. If you, too, are an aspiring outlaw hobbyist, I encourage you to peruse the following items, both at Spencer and in the broader KU Libraries collection.  

Grace Brazell
Administrative Associate

Selected Further Reading at KU Libraries:

• John Mathew Gutch’s scholarship on Robin Hood, 1847 (Call Number: PR2125 .G8)
• Reading Robin Hood: Content, Form and Reception in the Outlaw Myth by Stephen Knight, 2015 (Call Number: PR2129 .K57 2015)
• Images of Robin Hood: Medieval to Modern by Lois Potter, 2008 (Call Number: PR2129 .I63 2008)

Selected Further Reading at Spencer:

• Headlong Hall. : Nightmare Abbey. ; Maid Marian. ; Crotchet Castle by Thomas Love Peacock, 1837 (Call Number: O’Hegarty B4480)
• The English Archer; Or, Robert Earl of Huntingdon, Vulgarly Called Robin Hood, 1821, 1823 (Call Number: B1177)
• The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood of Great Renown, in Nottinghamshire by Howard Pyle, 1940 (Call Number: Children C101)
• Robin Hood and Little John or the Merry Men of Sherwood Forest by Pierce Egan, 1850 (Call Number: O’Hegarty D168)
• Robin Hood and the Archers of Merrie Sherwood by George Emmett, approximately 1875 (Call Number: O’Hegarty D275)
• Robin Hood and His Merry Foresters by Joseph Cundall, 1850 (Call Number: Children 1258A)

Kenneth Spencer Research Library’s current short-term exhibit explores some choice items from the library’s collection of medieval seals. This is a collaborative project put together by myself – Kaya Taylor – and my collaborator Eli Kumin, both of us long-time student workers here at the library.

Eli and I have cultivated a particular interest in medieval wax seals, spurred on by our work on a Sanders Scholar research project under the supervision of Dr. John McEwan. Beginning in September 2024, we spent the project exploring the Abbey Dore collection (Call Number: MS Q80) at Spencer, given the remarkably well-preserved seals and documents dating back from the 12th and 13th centuries. As the project came to a close in May 2025, Eli and I realized that we could memorialize our work and interests in the form of an exhibit case. Titled Sigillum, it is our way of giving others a look into these fascinating and unique pieces of history, here to be enjoyed roughly 4,000 miles away from where they originated.

The overarching narrative of the Abbey Dore collection is one of property and the interplay between royal and religious power in the medieval period. The language used in the documents points to the exchange of land for the salvation of the donors and their loved ones, e.g. “for her soul and the soul of Madoc [her husband]” (Call Number: MS Q80:13).

Visitors may notice there is one document unlike the others in the exhibit case, labeled “land conveyance of Sir Roger Lasceles to his four daughters” (Call Number: MS C150). Although separate from the Abbey Dore collection, this document is included because it’s a particular favorite of ours and it boasts several unique qualities: a chirograph edge and three intact seals with very clear impressions. We chose to include it at the starting point of the exhibit because of its eye-catching quality, pulling visitors into the discussion of further seals and documents within the case.

Although Eli and I came to know the Abbey Dore collection very well over time, we still felt a bit confused as to the relative geography of the Welsh Marches and the locations mentioned in the collection. We felt that visitors could benefit from seeing a map of the region, and so we resolved to make one that centered the relevant places and landmarks stretching across the Welsh-English border. Ultimately, we used ArcGIS software to put together the map seen in the exhibit.

We hope that Sigillum gives visitors a chance to appreciate not just the wax seals themselves, but the real human stories that stand behind them. We are excited to offer this glimpse into the medieval past, and grateful for the opportunity to bring these objects to light at Kenneth Spencer Research Library.

Sigillum: Seals and the Making of Medieval Authority is free and open to the public in Spencer’s North Gallery through July 31st.

Kaya Taylor and Eli Kumin
Public Services student assistants
KU Libraries Sanders Scholars 2024-2025

Well-loved children’s books spark the magic from the thrill of adventure to imagination of far-off, enchanted places. Beloved by generations, children’s classic stories remain with us throughout life, whether it’s re-reading childhood favorites or sharing our most loved stories with young people in our lives. These classics ignite imaginations and impart timeless lessons. They become some of our most cherished friends that stay with us throughout our lives.

Spencer Research Library has a vast children’s book collection to be explored. Some works have multiple editions published throughout the years. Different editions often have different illustrations, annotations, and even adaptations. This is the first post in a series highlighting various children’s book titles in Spencer’s holdings. First up, we bring you Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Spencer Research Library has seven holdings of Treasure Island. The publisher, publication date, and call number of each volume are listed below:

• Cassell & Company, Limited: London, Paris, New York & Melbourne, 1886 (O’Hegarty B2959).
• Scribner’s Sons: New York, 1913 (SC Annex 326).
• Rand McNally: New York and Chicago, copyrighted 1916, published 1928 (Children C623).
• Grosset & Dunlap: New York, 1934? (Children 5948).
• Limited Editions Club: New York, 1941 (D7309).
• Award Books: New York, 195-? (Children B2846).
• Franklin Watts: New York, 1964 (C18419).

This introduction appears in most editions of the book:

To the Hesitating Purchaser

If sailor tales to sailor tunes,
Storm and adventure, heat and cold,
If schooners, islands, and maroons
And Buccaneers and buried Gold,
And all the old romance, retold
Exactly in the ancient way,
Can please, as me they pleased of old,
The wiser youngsters of to-day:

–So be it, and fall on! If not,
If studious youth no longer crave,
His ancient appetites forgot,
Kingston, or Ballantyne the brave,
Or Cooper of the wood and wave:
So be it also! And may I
And all my pirates share the grave
Where these and their creations lie!

The first edition of Treasure Island – published by Cassell & Company in 1883 – featured no illustrations. Three years later, the publisher released a new edition with 18 pages of illustrations and 26 leaves of plates.

Maps of the island do not appear in every edition. Those that are included vary in detail, from topography and landmark descriptions.

The 1941 edition of Treasure Island, published by the Limited Editions Club, was limited to 1,500 copies.  Spencer Library’s edition is numbered 1,426. Colored Illustrations signed by Edward A. Wilson – which includes a signed lithograph of Long John Silver – and the unique binding of dark blue sailcloth and gold-stamped red leather spine label makes this edition a highly sought collectible.

Rand McNally published several editions of Treasure Island over the years. Kenneth Spencer Research Library holdings include a 1928 edition copyrighted in 1916. This edition features a durable hardback binding with full-page color illustrations along with black and white drawings. 

Details are scarce for many cover images. Several editions from this period featured Jim Hawkins or Long John Silver, given their key roles in the story. 

Meredith Phares
Operations Manager