Kenneth Spencer Research Library

The Daniel Vanderslice collection from the Kansas Collection was recently treated in the Stannard Conservation Laboratory. Every item in the collection was thoroughly surveyed, and select papers underwent treatments such as tear mending, tape removal, and humidification and flattening.

Daniel Vanderslice led a colorful and varied life. Born in Pennsylvania in 1799, he was apprenticed in 1820 as a papermaker in Chester County, PA. In 1822, he joined an expedition in the lead mines in northwestern Illinois, but by 1825 had moved to Kentucky and eventually became a partner in the Great Crossings paper mill with General William Johnson, nephew of U.S. Vice President Richard Johnson. Mr. Vanderslice was a trusted town leader, serving as postmaster and owner of the Kentucky Sentinel in Georgetown, KY. His ardent work in the Democratic party and perhaps friendship with the Johnsons led to his appointment as special agent for the removal of Chickasaws in 1837 from Memphis to Fort Coffee, in present-day Oklahoma.

List of Chickasaw Indians on the S.B. Itasca and the S.B. Liverpool. Kansas Collection, call number RH MS 136.1.7. Click image to enlarge.

Between 1853 and 1861, he was appointed by President Franklin Pierce as General Agent for the Great Nemaha Indian Agency that managed the activities of the Chickasaw, Iowa, Sac and Fox, and Kickapoo tribes. The collection includes administrative papers relating to these tasks.

Left: Pay Roll, Sac and Foxes of Missouri, April 1861, RH MS 136.4.12. Right: Plans for school house and teacher’s dwelling to be erected on the Iowa Reservation, 1860, RH MS 136.4.9b. Kansas Collection. Click images to enlarge.

A supporter of the Democratic Party, Mr. Vanderslice was a member of the Lecompton Constitutional Convention that in 1857 penned a document with aims to allow legal slave holding in Kansas when it became a state. Both the U.S. House of Representatives and Kansas voters later rejected the proposed constitution, and Kansas entered the Union as a free state on January 29, 1861.

Document titled, “Democratic Convention,” 1857, RH MS 136.3.1. Click image to enlarge.

Whitney Baker
Head, Conservation Services

In honor of Veteran’s Day on November 11, we feature this item from the Verlean Tidwell Family Collection, from our African American Experience Collections. This collection was donated by Dr. John Edgar Tidwell, a KU English Department faculty member. His mother, Mrs. Verlean Tidwell, served as a member of Maple Street Baptist Church in Independence, Kansas, for more than 70 years.

This handmade Veteran’s Day book was compiled by Mrs. Arletta Moore in 1966 to honor veterans of World War I and II from Maple St. Baptist Church.

The decorated cover features glitter, gold stickers, and a silk flower. Call number RH MS 1286 Box 10, Kansas Collection. Click image to enlarge.

The book includes clippings about war, a typed list of veterans and their next of kin, poems, and handwritten notations. Call number RH MS 1286 Box 10, Kansas Collection. Click images to enlarge.

Detail of handwritten Pledge of Allegiance, along with gold stickers and handwritten “war” in block letters. Call number RH MS 1286 Box 10, Kansas Collection. Click image to enlarge.

Whitney Baker
Head, Conservation Services

Over four-hundred years ago, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra conceived of one of the most enduring characters of western literature: a gentleman who, upon reading too many chivalric romances, determined to go into the world as Don Quixote and practice the art of chivalry.

The first volume of El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha was published in 1605, to immediate success. The book was quickly translated into many languages; Spencer Library houses many translations of this seminal work.

After the success of Don Quixote, Cervantes turned his attention to writing other works, particularly Novelas ejemplares and Viaje al Parnaso. However, in 1614, a spurious sequel to El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha appeared in print, by a rival writing under the assumed name of Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda. In response, Cervantes penned the authorized Don Quixote sequel, Segunda Parte del Ingenioso Cavallero Don Quixote de la Mancha, which appeared in print in late 1615. In honor of the four-hundredth anniversary of the publication of the second and final volume featuring Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, please enjoy some images of the gentleman knight as depicted through the ages and in different translations.

The knight errant: Frontispiece of Don Kichote de la Mantscha (Frankfurt, 1669). Special Collections, Call Number Cervantes X6. Click image to enlarge.

The dreaming hidalgo: Frontispiece and title page of The history of the renowned Don Quixote de la Mancha (London, 1749). Special Collections, Call Number Cervantes X3 v. 1. Click image to enlarge.

Acting chivalrously: Frontispiece and title page of Leben und Thaten des weisen Junkers Don Quixote von la Mancha (Leipzig, 1780). Special Collections, Call Number Cervantes Y110 v. 3. Click image to enlarge.

Fighting windmills: Frontispiece and title page of Den Tappre och Snillrike Riddaren Don Quixotes af Mancha Lefverne och Bedrifter (Stockholm, 1818). Special Collections, Call Number Cervantes Y49 v. 1-2. Click image to enlarge.

Reading chivalric romances: Frontispiece and title page of Histoire de Don Quichotte de la Manche (Paris, 1853). Special Collections, Call Number Cervantes Y45. Click image to enlarge.

Whitney Baker
Head, Conservation Services

The Irish collections from Special Collections at Spencer Library were represented at the Kansas City Irish Fest this past Labor Day weekend. We were asked by Irish Fest organizers to exhibit some items from our W. B. Yeats Collection to celebrate the sesquicentennial of his birth. Featured here are a few of the items selected by Special Collections Librarian Elspeth Healey.

Whitney Baker and Elspeth Healey at KC Irish Fest

Letter from W. B. Yeats to A. H. Bullen. March 28, [1909].

In this letter, we see Yeats’s generosity to other writers as he encourages his publisher, A. H. Bullen, to read the manuscript of a young poet that he had met in London. “There may be some fire in the flax,” he comments to Bullen. Though the letter’s dateline does not include a year, Yeats’s opening reference to the death of Irish writer J. M. Synge fixes the date as 1909. Just two years earlier, Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World had sparked audience protests when it was first performed at the Abbey Theatre. Some nationalist viewers objected the play’s language and what they saw as its unflattering portrayal of Irish peasant society.

Letter from W. B. Yeats to A. H. Bullen. March 28, [1909]. Special Collections, call number MS 25 Wa 2.57. Click image to enlarge.

Yeats, W. B. “Tom O’ Roughley,” typescript with manuscript emendations. ca. 1918.

This typescript copy of “Tom O’Roughley” is signed and revised in manuscript by Yeats, with additional markings in pencil by the printer. It appeared in Nine Poems (1918), a collection printed privately by Yeats’s friend Clement Shorter. Shorter also printed for private circulation the first edition of Yeats’s poem “Easter 1916.” The “Tom O’Roughley” of this poem shares much with the figure of the “fool” outlined by Yeats in Phase 28 of A Vision (1925, 1937). There Yeats writes, “his thoughts are an aimless reverie; his acts are aimless like his thoughts, and it is in his aimlessness that he finds joy.”

Yeats, W. B. “Tom O’ Roughley,” typescript with manuscript emendations. ca. 1918. Special Collections, call number MS 25 Wd.1.3 Tom O’Roughley. Click image to enlarge.

A Broadside. Dundrum, Ireland: E.C. Yeats, The Cuala Press. No. 9, Second Year (February 1910)

W. B. Yeats’s sisters Susan (Lily) and Elizabeth (Lolly) founded Cuala Industries in 1908, following an earlier printing and craft venture, Dun Emer Industries. Lily produced embroidery, and Lolly oversaw the Cuala Press, which brought out titles by primarily Irish writers, including many by W. B. Yeats himself. Below is an issue of A Broadside, a series that featured both contemporary and traditional poems and ballads. Each issue was printed in folio format—a single sheet folded once—and was illustrated with hand-colored woodcuts by Yeats’s brother, the artist Jack B. Yeats, who also edited the first series (1908-1915).

A Broadside. Dundrum, Ireland: E.C. Yeats, The Cuala Press. No. 9, Second Year (February 1910). Special Collections, call number Yeats Y339, No. 9, Year 2. Click image to enlarge.

Whitney Baker
Head, Conservation Services

Among the many treasures in the Kansas Collection are the Fowler-Rose-Thompson Collection ribbons. These beautiful silk ribbons depict Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt and commemorate the Almena, Kansas Congregational Church’s “Old Folks Day.” The over 100-year-old ribbons arrived in the conservation lab stored vertically in an archival folder. Due to their age and fragility, the ribbons were torn, fraying, and wrinkled. After the ribbons were flattened and mended by Whitney Baker, Conservator for KU Libraries, their storage situation needed to be addressed.

Three ribbons from the Fowler-Rose-Thompson Collection, call number RH MS 88. Click image to enlarge.

To better preserve these delicate ribbons, an entirely new housing arrangement was in order. The priorities for the new housing were to 1) ensure that the ribbons were stored horizontally to prevent any sagging or further wrinkling of the fragile silk and 2) to minimize the need for direct handling of the ribbons. A hinged, floating mount achieves both requisites.

The floating mount arrangement that Whitney advised allows for the attachment of the ribbons to a piece of mat board without the use of damaging adhesives. Instead, strips of polyethylene tape run through slits on either side of the ribbons. The polyethylene tape acts like a seat-belt, holding the ribbons in place without obstructing the view of the ribbons.

Detail of polyethylene strapping over bottom of ribbon. Click image to enlarge.

Hinged to this first piece of mat board with gummed tape is a mat board frame. The frame allows the entirety of the ribbons to remain visible, which reduces the need for handling, while acting as a buffer for the floating mount’s cover. The cover, a third piece of mat board, is also hinged with gummed tape to the first piece of mat board to further protect the ribbons.

Left: Attaching mat frame to back board with gummed tape. Right: The final three-part mat. Click images to enlarge.

This book-like housing arrangement was then placed into a plastazote-lined archival box for added protection and to ensure that the ribbons remain horizontal.

Brecken Liebl
Conservation Intern
KU Museum Studies Graduate Student