1. Pliny, Naturae historiarum libri xxxvii, Hagenoae: T.A. Badensis, 1518.

In 1891 Carrie Watson, the University's first librarian, wrote "The first most noteworthy gift the library ever received was from Hon. W. A. Phillips, of Salina. It is one of our oldest books in two ways. It is among the first books of the library, and its date of publication, 1518, makes it the oldest book we have."

This great work of natural history is no longer our oldest book but it holds particular pride of place as the foundation gift of our rare books collection, a collection which is built in great part by gifts from such friends and has natural history as one of its strongest specialties.

The collecting of rare books and manuscripts at the University of Kansas long precedes the opening of the Spencer Library. It began within twenty years of the University's founding with the purchase from J.S. Crew & Co., a Lawrence bookseller, in June 1881, of Raleigh's History of the World in 5 Books (London, 1687) for $3.87, along with Johnson's The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (London, 1781), 4 vols. at 63 cents each, and 30 other 18th century English imprints. By August 1886, donations of rare books had begun with the gift of Pliny's Naturae historiarum libri xxxvii from William A. Phillips, a Scottish expatriate who had come to Kansas in 1855 as a special correspondent for the New York Tribune and stayed to found the city of Salina.

These early acquisitions—all except one of the 18th century titles still in the library despite having been in the general stacks for nearly 80 years—eventually became the nucleus of a rare books collection with natural history and the English 18th century as two of its strongest specialties.

In 1945 the University of Kansas received its first gift of a major collection of rare materials with the bequest by Ralph Nicholson Ellis, Jr. (1908-1945) of his extraordinary collection of ornithological books and manuscripts: over 15,000 volumes, as well as several thousand pamphlets, letters, original drawings, manuscripts, and other materials, perhaps a third concerned purely with ornithology, including a great many items which are rare or in some way unique. Another third is devoted to voyages and travels (mainly scientific expeditions, including considerable ornithological data), and the remainder is made up of other natural history together with a useful bibliographical collection. Ellis, a California collector and ornithologist, formed his library from 1930 to 1945, with a particularly intense period of collecting in 1936 and 1937 in London where he worked with the booksellers Sotheran, Quaritch, and Wheldon and Wesley. His collecting continued up to his death, with many of his acquisitions coming from the California booksellers John Howell, Dawson's, and Zeitlin and VerBrugge, and from H.P. Kraus and the Anderson Galleries of New York.

While the most obviously striking items from the Ellis Collection are certainly the great illustrated folios such as Catesby's The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands (present in five variant editions and issues), it is not for the beauty of the illustrative art but for their contribution to scientific knowledge that the books are valued in this collection. William Turner's Avium Praecipuarum . . . Historia (Cologne, 1544)—the earliest of countless books on birds written by Englishmen, the first serious criticism of classical ornithologists and the first scientific book on birds—and many other 16th through 18th century writers (Belon, John Ray, and Edwards, for example) represent the scientific spirit of the pre-Linnaean ornithologists. Notable examples from the post-Linnaean period are Alexander Wilson's American Ornithology (Philadelphia, 1808-1814) which marks the beginning of serious American ornithology, Darwin's On the Origin of Species (the first edition of 1859 and the five subsequent editions revised during Darwin's lifetime as well as many later editions), and works of such scientists as Phillips, Max Fürbringer, and Benjamin Smith Barton. Work on a catalogue of the ornithological portions of the Ellis Collection was begun by Robert M. Mengel in the early 1950s; volumes covering authors A-D have been published.

Collections cause collecting. This is one of the important additions made to the Ellis Collection by the Library, acquired by Joseph Rubinstein and added to the collection on 20 November 1957.

The technical problems of representing the iridescent colors of hummingbird plumage in his illustrations exercised Gould's ingenuity until he developed a process involving the use of gold leaf which provides a remarkable glowing realism in his pictures. He displayed his own collection of mounted specimens of hummingbirds—his favorite birds—in a pavilion in the London Zoological Gardens during the Great Exhibition of 1851. 5,378 of his specimens, which his daughter said were forcing the Goulds out of their house, were sold to the British Museum after his death.

Of particular note in the Ellis Collection is the remarkable collection of the works of John Gould, one of the 19th century's most notable ornithological illustrators. In addition to all of Gould's major works, the Ellis Collection has ninety percent of the world's surviving Gould drawings and paintings— amounting to over 2,000 sketches, annotated drawings, water-colors (both rough and highly-finished), tissue drawings and tracings, and twelve lithographic stones, almost all acquired by Ralph Ellis from H. Sotheran in 1936/37. Significant additions to this archive have been made over the past 25 years by gifts and purchases from Dr. Gordon C. Sauer of Kansas City, a number of drawings acquired from Christie's, and the purchase from H.P. Kraus of two volumes of Gould drawings once owned by Sir William Jardine, 1800-1874.

Acquired in 1960 from the University of Helsinki Library through the efforts of Oswald P. Backus, III, KU professor of History and Law, one of a number of faculty book selectors who helped build the collections.

The acquisition of the Ellis Collection in 1945 brought the Library what was reputed to be the most extensive collection of works by and about the great 18th century taxonomist Carolus Linnaeus in the hands of any private collector in the United States. Ellis himself stated that the next best collection of Linnaeus belonged to "a botany professor in Nebraska". The acquisition in 1953 of the botanical part of the collection of Prof. T. J. Fitzpatrick bore out Ellis's estimate, including Linnaeus holdings almost equal in number to those in the Ellis collection. The combination of the Linnaeus materials from these two collections—a literal combination in some cases, such as the 10th edition of the Systema naturae (1758-1759), the first volume of which is from the Ellis Collection and the second from Fitzpatrick—produced the best collection in the United States, not surpassed or equalled until the acquisition of Birger Strandell's wonderful Linnaeus library by the Hunt Botanical Library in Pittsburgh.

Today the Spencer Library Linnaeus collection, developed by the professional attention of Sally Haines, the department's botanical specialist, includes well over two thousand volumes containing a much larger number of individual works by and about Linnaeus. Nearly all of his major works are here in many editions, of which a hundred or more are first editions. Particularly notable are the various editions of the Systema Naturae, a complete set of the Linnaean dissertations in their first editions, a splendid copy of the Hortus Cliffortianus (1737), the first edition, first and second issues, of the Species plantarum (1753), the work in which Linnaeus first applied binomial nomenclature to botany, and the scarce first edition of Pehr Kalm's En Resa till Norra America (1753-1761). The collection also includes long runs of the journals published by the principal Linnaean societies, many biographical works, and early editions of works by Linnaeus' disciples and contemporaries.

Pryce H2

This block is from the only surviving series of original blocks representing the great folio woodcut-illustrated scientific books of the mid-sixteenth century.

Gift of Katherine E. Stannard in memory of Jerry Stannard, professor of the History of Science at the University of Kansas. Acquired in 1989 from Alecto Historical Editions.

In 1953, Robert Vosper, then University Librarian, learned from the Kansas City bookseller, Frank Glenn, of the availability of the library of Thomas Jefferson Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick had been a botanist on the faculty of the University of Nebraska for many years, never completing his Ph.D., always ill-paid (never more than $1800 a year), producing over 200 scientific articles and books, and building one of the largest private collections in the history of botany in America. His interests were not restricted to botany, but ranged into other scientific and historical subjects. When he died in 1952 at the age of 83, he left his executor with the nightmare of dealing with 90 tons of very precious paper. The 10,000 volumes of scientific books and manuscripts which the University of Kansas Libraries acquired included, in addition to his Linnaeus collection, an excellent small collection of the English natural historians John Ray and Francis Willughby; an important collection of the works of the American biologist C.S. Rafinesque, including a fine copy of his Caratteri di alcuni nuovi generi e nuove specie di animali e piante della Sicilia (Palermo, 1810), his rare single-issue journal, Annals of Nature (Lexington, Ky., 1820), and complete runs of periodical ventures such as his Atlantic Journal and Friend of Knowledge (Philadelphia, 1832-1833); various works by Newton and many of the early herbalists. In American science the most notable holdings are in botany, the work of such men as William Darlington, Jacob Bigelow, Thomas Nuttall, and Stephen Elliot.

The department's holdings in botany began with the Fitzpatrick acquisition but have not, especially in the case of the early herbals, stopped there. With the Fitzpatrick library we acquired Brunfels, Chabrey, a delightful hand-coloured Dioscorides of 1543, Evelyn's Silva, Fuchs, Gesner, and Nehemiah Grew, to give only a few samples of the wealth of this acquisition. Our continuing interest is demonstrated by the presence in our stacks of the 1517 Hortus Sanitatis, the L'Ecluse Rariorum Plantarum Historia (Antwerp, 1601), many 16th century editions of Mattioli on Dioscorides, Dalechamps' Historia Generalis Plantarum (Lyon, 1586-1587), L'Heritier de Brutelle's Sertum Anglicanum (1788-1792), Horace Walpole's Essay on Modern Gardening (1785), and very many others.

The acquisition of the Ellis and Fitzpatrick collections gave impetus for the appointment of specialized staff and the provision of separate quarters for the rare materials. In 1953 the Department of Special Collections was established and its first curator, Joseph Rubinstein, was appointed to develop and care for the University's rare books and manuscripts. A native New Yorker, educated at the University of Arizona and the University of California, Berkeley, Rubinstein was a man of great erudition, with a keen memory, an unrivaled fund of bibliographical knowledge, fluency in several languages, and a thorough familiarity with the book market. An excellent teacher, he welcomed undergraduates to the department and established its dedication to the support of research and teaching. His ten years at KU shaped most of the Department's major collecting areas for the future and he continued to help build the collections after he left the University for the life of an antiquarian bookseller.

Rubinstein's appointment coincided with a period of great expansion in the activities of the entire library system under the leadership of a bibliophile chancellor, Franklin D. Murphy, and a remarkable librarian, Robert Vosper.

During his nine years as Director of Libraries, Robert Vosper built the University of Kansas Libraries collections from less than mediocrity to near excellence. He founded and encouraged the Department of Special Collections and it was on his watch that our disparate beginnings became recognized as the foundation collections for a major rare book and manuscripts library. Such wide-ranging contributions made by a director tend to merge imperceptibly with the history of the library itself, remembered as "the Vosper years" or some such phrase, but not connected to any specific book or collection. It seemed to us, when Vosper left Kansas for the directorship of the UCLA Libraries, that if other contributions, inevitably lesser than his, were memorialized in collection names, his name should be attached to some object of particular merit.

Among our mediaeval manuscripts, which are mainly text manuscripts, is one book of particular beauty, a fine French 15th century Book of Hours, acquired from Harry Levinson (bought at the Sotheby auction of 7 December 1953, lot 30, from the library of Miss Priscilla Gordon). Its spectacular appearance and the attention and enthusiasm which it generated in our readers led the Department of Special Collections to name this fine book The Vosper Hours, ensuring that Robert Vosper's name is remembered whenever the manuscript is read or cited.

The Department collects manuscripts primarily for their texts and also, in the case of mediaeval manuscripts, for the information they convey about the way books were published before the invention of printing. Very few of our manuscripts can be considered works of art—the Vosper Hours and a few of the renaissance manuscripts—although many are illustrated. Their subject matter runs parallel to that of the entire printed holdings of the department—economic and political history, literature, religion and church history, natural history, law and legal records, family and institutional history, language (a number of glossaries and grammatical texts), travel and exploration—while their chronological scope is much greater. The few examples shown here show our interest in Italy and Britain, in the history of pharmacy (a natural extension of the library's longstanding interest in medicinal botany), in architecture, and in eastern Europe. The apparent disproportionate emphasis on manuscripts purchased from Bernard M. Rosenthal reflects the care which he has exercised in assisting us to build our collections over the years.

Acquired from Bernard M. Rosenthal.

This is an unfinished or defective compilation of various chronicles of English history from Severus through Uther Pendragon. The irregularly shaped columns (some empty) appear to represent different sources; the only one so far identified is Geoffrey of Monmouth. The only illustrations are the pen sketches of dragons and fleurs-de-lys; presumably the finished product would have had portraits or names added to the empty roundels. At least one membrane is missing between the present first and second of the five membranes, pasted head to tail, which make up this chronicle roll.

Acquired in 1983 from Bernard M. Rosenthal through the Helen Foresman Spencer fund.

Acquired in 1980 from Lawrence Feinberg through the Helen Foresman Spencer fund.

MS E9, document 127

In the 1550s, Vespasiano Gonzaga Colonna, duke of Sabbioneta, near Mantua, began to turn the small village of Sabbioneta, which was the site of his summer palace, into a model city. The Sabbioneta Documents collection is a volume of 172 documents issued by or concerning this planned city from 1537 to 1778 but dating mainly from the 1570s through the early 17th century— proclamations, financial accounts, letters, contracts, payment orders, narratives, and official documents. They include a complete cost accounting of the Giardino della Fontana, a list of current expenses for the upkeep of the Church of the Incoronata, records of payments made to artists, stonemasons, freight-haulers, the Duke's German Guard and his courtiers. It is possible to determine from the records the source of materials for many public buildings in the city, the status of traveling players (housed at the same level of accommodation as carpenters), the administrative difficulties of extensive building in an occupied city (proclamations requesting people to keep off the streets which are under construction and forbidding them from stealing building materials), and a great many other details of this major project.

Acquired from Bernard M. Rosenthal.

14. A devil in the mouth of Hell, in a 17th century Russian manuscript of St. John Chrysostom.

Acquired from Bernard M. Rosenthal around 1960 at the instance of Oswald P. Backus, III, professor of History and Russian.

Printed over 500 years ago, this broadside is a single-sheet advertisement of the "good German books" for sale by the Augsburg printer and publisher Anton Sorg. Printed on a piece of waste paper ruled for handwriting, it is almost certainly a printer's proof and as such is unique.

Donated to the library in July 1993 by Sam Follett Anderson, emeritus professor of German and Slavic.

Within about 15 years of the invention of printing, printers began advertising their publications by issuing lists of available books. Printed in the form of small posters (on one side of a single sheet of paper), these lists were widely distributed, handed out or posted on buildings. Few of them survived; only about thirty different advertisements are known, most of them from single copies accidentally preserved, often as reinforcement sheets in bindings.

In the late summer of 1939, just as he was leaving Hitler's Germany, a student named Sam Anderson, who had been studying abroad, bought a packet of minor manuscript fragments from the Munich bookseller, Hugendubel. It was not until he reached home that he found a printed broadside among the leaves of manuscript.

This broadside proved to be a single-sheet advertisement of the "good German books" for sale by the Augsburg printer and publisher Anton Sorg. Like most publishers' advertisements from that day to this, it was undated, but it is obvious from the known dates of the books listed for sale that it was published about 1483. It is known in two versions, the later version (known in five fragmentary copies existing in German libraries) including one more book than this first version. It is remarkable for the relatively large number of books listed and for its content—entirely books in the German vernacular and most of those heavily illustrated; it appears to be aimed at the general public rather than the learned classes. The Anderson copy, printed on a piece of waste paper ruled for handwriting, is almost certainly a printer's proof and as such is unique. The only other known copy of this version, in the Lilly Library at Indiana University, is on good paper and must be one of those issued to the public.

In July 1993, Sam Follett Anderson, emeritus professor of German and Slavic, donated his Sorg broadside to the Spencer Library. On that occasion, the distinguished antiquarian bookseller Bernard Rosenthal wrote "The rarity and the significance of this broadside for the history of printing and publishing can hardly be overstated—a printer's proof copy of the first advertisement devoted exclusively to German vernacular books. Your decision to assure the future safety and availability of this ephemeral piece of the early history of one of the foundations of modern civilization will benefit generations of students and scholars."

These illustrations show John Huss, the Bohemian religious reformer, being burnt at the stake for heresy and his ashes cast into the river Rhine. The execution took place on 6 July 1413 during the Council.

The Summerfield Collection of Renaissance and Early Modern Books was begun in 1957, supported in its first ten years by a grant from the late Solon E. Summerfield, a KU alumnus, and then by the Kansas University Endowment Association. It has no restriction of subject beyond the common-sense avoidance of duplication with other collections in the neighborhood but only the restrictions of place and time: the books must have been printed on the continent of Europe before 1701. It is the collection to which we assign all European imprints before 1701. Preference is given to those works which have not been competently re-edited within the past hundred and fifty years or so and which must therefore be read in their original editions, such as the French humanist Guillaume Budé, most of whose works remain available only in 16th century editions, and the political theorist Jean Bodin, whose Les Six Livres de la Republique, of which we have the first edition (1576) and eight subsequent 16th century editions, is another essential work not existing in a modern critical edition.

Although we collect primarily for text—for the great varieties of the books used over the centuries by scholars, students, and readers, with particular emphasis on history, literature, law, science, theology, and the arts— the Summerfield books incidentally provide rich sources for the history of printing, bibliographical studies, the knowledge of provenance, and the study of bindings and illustration.

Most of the purchasing of the Summerfield books is done title by title, thus preserving its intentional variety and breadth of subject, but a few large purchases made in the early years of the grant provided particular strength and influenced the shape the collection was to take. The first of these was the acquisition in 1957 of a thousand volumes from the library of the Archivist of France, Léon Dorez. Dorez' great interest was in the Italian humanists and his library included both the famous and the obscure: Boccaccio, Petrarch, Tasso, Alamanni, Andreini, many editions of the writings of Cardinal Bembo, the most complete edition of Poliziano's Latin writings (Basel, 1553), Palingenius' Zodiacus Vitae, as well as numbers of 16th century Italian plays, the first Italian translation of Alberti's book of architecture (Venice, 1546), the 1619 edition of the works of Serlio, such historians as Sabellicus, Guicciardini, and Sleidanus, and a few Greek and Roman authors.

19. Biblia polyglotta, Alcala de Henares: in Complutensi universitate, industria Arnaldi Gulielmi de Brocario, 1514-1517 [i.e., 1520 or 1521].

This copy of the great Complutensian polyglot Bible (in Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, and Latin), edited by Cardinal Ximenes, is shown closed to display the ownership brands on the fore- and top-edges of the text block. This particularly Mexican form of indicating ownership indicates that the six-volume set once belonged to the library of the Convento de San Agustin in Puebla de Los Angeles, Mexico.

20. The Torrelaguna manuscript, written at the Convento de la Madre de Dios, a Franciscan monastery in Torrelaguna, Spain, over many years beginning in about 1520.

MS C238

Gift of the Helen F. Spencer fund; acquired in 1974 from Colin and Charlotte Franklin.

Cardinal Francisco Ximenes de Cisneros (1436-1517), who edited the Complutensian Polyglot, was born in the small town of Torrelaguna, some thirty miles north of Madrid, and founded the Franciscan monastery of La Madre de Dios there, beginning its construction in 1517. This manuscript, mainly concerned with the annals and business affairs of the monastery (including such matters as a dispute between the town and the monastery about the maintenance of an aqueduct built by Ximenes), contains as its first item an otherwise unknown biography of the cardinal.

Dorez' collection of the Italian humanists had its Spanish equivalent in a somewhat larger purchase of the following year. Sir William Stirling-Maxwell, noted for his The Cloister Life of the Emperor Charles V, was a great 19th century British Hispanist and book collector. His library included a magnificent emblem collection (now at the University of Glasgow, with the exception of a dozen or so volumes which form the basis of the Spencer Library's collection of about 100 emblem books), a collection of books on art and design, and a working library of historical sources of the 16th and 17th centuries. It was this last section of over two thousand volumes which the University acquired from Lathrop C. Harper in 1958. They are Spanish, French, and Italian imprints for the most part, with a small but significant number of Dutch books. The rich accumulation of 16th and 17th century Spanish chronicles, many of which have not been republished in critical editions, is rivalled by the large number of contemporary tracts about Charles V, with the relevant histories and biographies. Beyond these and other smaller collections of Spanish city and town histories, there is a rich conspectus of Spanish literature, including a strong Cervantes collection, early editions of such authors as Juan de Mena and Jorge Manrique and a fine copy of the Cancionero General, Antwerp, 1573. Yet the solid value lies not so much in these high spots as in the hundreds of contemporary editions of the poets, travelers, theologians, historians, and bibliographers of the time. As one would expect, there are extensive materials on the Austrian and Dutch parts of the Spanish empire, including some important legal material.

The third of these early large purchases was nearly a thousand volumes of legal history acquired in 1963, continuing a trend begun earlier with the purchase of the 1475 Schoeffer Codex Justinianus—the collecting of editions of Roman and canon law and their commentators.

Significant additions have been made over the years to most of the subjects begun by the early major purchases, increasing our strength in French and Italian history and literature, history of science (with help from many booksellers—notably Zeitlin & VerBrugge, Wheldon and Wesley, Antiquariat Junk, Björk and Börjessen, and Martayan Lan), Dutch politics, Protestantism, geography and the history of art, and extending our interests to early Polish imprints (acquired mainly from Alexander Janta), Eastern Europe, and the great French Byzantinists.

21. Aristotle, Summa philozophie moralis, Leipzig: Martin Landsberg, ca 1492.

Bound with this are three manuscripts of works attributed to Aristotle, including the pseudo-Aristotelian work "De pomo", translated from Hebrew into Latin by King Manfred of Sicily. It is clear from the presence of these four works together in their 15th century binding that, in the eyes of the original owner, a book is a book whether printed or handwritten and is important for what it says rather than for the form in which it was made. Following the modern separate appreciation and valuation of manuscript and printed books we keep this book with the manuscripts.

Acquired from Bernard Rosenthal in 1969.

The collection has 127 incunabula, a relatively small number, and a study collection of separate leaves from 78 more. 15th century books especially worthy of mention are a beautifully illuminated Sweynheym and Pannartz Caesar of 1469, three Jensons (the Macrobrius of 1472, the first edition of Landini's translation of Pliny, 1476, and the 1478 Plutarch), the only known Western hemisphere copy of the Pachel and Scinzenzeler Vergil of 1487 (donated by Robert Aitchison of Wichita in 1964 as part of his Vergil collection), Sir Robert Peel's copy of Aldus' Hypnerotomachia Poliphili of 1499, Amerbach's 1494 printing of Trithemius' Liber de scriptoribus ecclesiasticis (the first modern bio-bibliography), the 1477 Legenda aurea of Johannes Baemler, and Marciletti's Doctrinale florum artis notarie (Lyon, ca. 1490), one of two known copies.

Found as binding reinforcement inside the upper cover of a copy of the 1636 edition of Barclay his Argenis (C34).

This leaf is the only evidence for this early version of the Legend of the Cross apart from two narrow strips of vellum from the same manuscript now in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

Shown beside the manuscript leaf is the leather of the binding in which it was found, with some of the text in mirror image.

The Department of Special Collections has often attempted to acquire particular books for researchers; sometimes we have acquired more than we expected.

In 1957, at the request of Prof. Kenneth Rothwell of the KU English Department, the Department bought a copy of John Barclay's Barclay his Argenis (London: Printed for Henry Seile, 1636; STC 1392.5), from Pearson's Book Rooms in Cambridge for 4 guineas. A very ordinary appearing book in an undistinguished binding, this copy seemed to have little history, only the names of Frances Appleton, Isaack Preston, and Jo: Coleman of Wodnesber (Wednesbury?), scribbled on the endpapers with the date "1656". However, this common book proved to carry some uncommon baggage.

Between the thin cardboard and the thick ill-pasted brown calf cover of both boards there was a leaf of manuscript used as reinforcement. Discovered by John Siedzik, then manuscripts librarian, these leaves were removed from the binding by Max Adjarian of the Grolier Bindery, Mission, KS. Once out of their hiding place, the two leaves proved not to be the usual castoff leaves of liturgical Latin but two leaves of 11th century Anglo-Saxon text, somewhat damaged, some of their text actually pulled off onto the leather, but still legible. They were studied, identified and published (Speculum 37:1, January 1962, 60-78), by Bertram Colgrave, Durham University, and Ann Hyde, University of Kansas, now Curator of Manuscripts in the Spencer Library. Both glossed by the 13th figure known only as "the tremulous Worcester hand" from his shaky handwriting, the leaves were probably in their parent books in the library of Worcester Cathedral from the 11th century to the 16th and both were almost certainly removed and later discarded by Archbishop Matthew Parker (1504-1575), who owned a number of Worcester manuscripts, to end up on the same anonymous binder's scrap heap, some time between 1636 and 1656.

Reinforcing the upper board was a leaf of the "Legend of the Cross", an Anglo-Saxon text of the first half of the 11th century, with Latin glosses of the 13th century (Pryce MS C2:1). This leaf is the only evidence for this early version of the Legend of the Cross apart from two narrow strips of vellum from the same manuscript which are now in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (C.C.C.C. MS 557; Ker 73). These were found in the bindings of two books dated 1563 and 1573, both formerly belonging to Matthew Parker.

Reinforcing the lower board was a leaf of a homily by Ælfric, abbot of Eynsham, De uno confessore, an Anglo-Saxon text of the late 11th century, also with glosses of the 13th century (Pryce MS C2:2). The parent manuscript (Hatton 115) of this leaf is now at the Bodleian Library of Oxford University, one of four important Worcester Anglo-Saxon manuscripts acquired by Sir Christopher Hatton in 1644 and left to the library in 1670. Our leaf had been removed by Parker or his secretary, John Joscelyn, before Hatton's acquisition.

These two leaves, with a glossary leaf (Ker 240) from the collection of Sir Thomas Phillipps, acquired from the Kansas City bookseller Frank Glenn in 1954 in "a lot of fragments", give the Spencer Library three of the baker's dozen of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts in the Western Hemisphere.

In 1963, Merrel Clubb (professor of English at KU) asked the library to purchase a copy of Franciscus Junius' edition of Caedmonis monachi Paraphrasis poetica Genesios (Amsterdam, 1655; Clubb C 1655.1) from John Bryson, Librarian of Balliol. With this as a basis, Ann Hyde of the Spencer Library, working mainly with the Devon bookseller I. Morton-Smith, developed the Clubb Collection (named in honor of Professor Clubb and his son Roger) into not only the best known -- perhaps the only -- intentionally built collection of books printed in Anglo-Saxon typefaces but also an excellent source for the beginnings of English historical and textual scholarship. Now under the care of Richard Clement, also of the Spencer Library, the collection includes more than 300 volumes of the works of the great septentrional antiquaries.

The intensive study of Anglo-Saxon texts and the printing of them began with Archbishop Matthew Parker (1504-1575). Parker, moved not only by the motives of disinterested scholarship but by a political need to prove the antiquity of the English church, collected manuscripts assiduously (and unscrupulously) and in 1566 hired John Day to cut the first Anglo-Saxon types. This font is represented in the Clubb collection by three examples: Ælfric's A Testimonie of Antiquitie (London, 1566), the first book printed in this type and perhaps the first book printed in England in a font designed, cut, and cast in England by an Englishman, William Lambarde's [Archaionomia], sive De priscis anglorum legibus libri (London, 1568), and Parker's edition of Asser's Ælfredi Regis Res gestae (London, 1574), a curious production— a Latin text printed in Day's Anglo-Saxon types. The interest in English antiquities aroused by Parker became a consuming one for the next two centuries and the printing of texts continued rapidly.

The manuscript, the printer's copy for the Concilia, is open to the beginning of a section concerning the duties and position of a priest; in the printed Concilia (No. 25; Clubb E 1639.1) it begins in the middle of p. 586.

This copy (one of two in the Spencer Library—the other belonged to Thomas Hearne) bears the bookplate of one of the original subscribers, James Bertie, Esq., of Stanwell. The library acquired it from John Bryson, librarian of Balliol College, Oxford, in 1963.

Despite the opinion of her guardian, who thought that one language was enough for a woman to know, Elizabeth Elstob learned Anglo-Saxon from her brother William, an Oxford-educated scholar, who encouraged her to learn as many as eight languages, including Latin. She acted as his housekeeper, but in fact was his partner in scholarship. She worked on a number of texts and in 1709 published one of Aelfric's homilies as The English-Saxon Homily on the Nativity of St. Gregory (London: W. Bowyer, 1709) with an English translation and a preface which secured for her a reputation as a linguist and a scholar. In 1715, she published The rudiments of grammar for the English-Saxon tongue, first given in English: with an apology for the study of northern antiquities, Being very useful for the understanding of our ancient English poets (London: William Bowyer, 1715), the first Anglo-Saxon grammar written in English rather than Latin. Miss Elstob explains in her preface that the Grammar is intended to instruct young ladies in the rudiments of the language, but in fact it was used far more widely. In America, for example, Thomas Jefferson made extensive use of it in his own investigations of Anglo-Saxon.

The Spencer Library owns, in addition to the Homily and the Grammar, one of Miss Elstob's manuscripts (MS B93), a quasi-facsimile transcription of a 10th century Latin canticle with 12th century Anglo-Saxon glosses (from Salisbury Cathedral MS 150) and of a letter of Charles II to Paul Testard. This was made as a gift to her brother's patron, the antiquarian scholar William Nicholson, Bishop of Carlisle, and bears his note of receipt of the gift, dated Nov. 7. 1709.

Although texts continued to appear after the publication of the last great monument of Anglo-Saxon printing, Wilkins' Concilia (London, 1737), the number diminished and in the early 19th century when interest rose again the use of Anglo-Saxon fonts was largely abandoned. One of the old fonts has been used in the present century: the Elstob types. These types, designed by the great palaeographer Humphrey Wanley for Elizabeth Elstob's Grammar of 1715, to replace Bowyer's earlier types (destroyed by fire) in which Miss Elstob had printed her edition of one of Aelfric's homilies in 1709, were acquired by the Oxford University Press before 1764. In 1900 they were used by Horace Hart in some notes on typography, and in 1910 (after some modification) for Robert Bridges' "On the Present State of English Pronunciation" (Essays and Studies, Oxford, 1910).

Acquired from Il Polifilo, Milan, by Joseph Rubinstein on his European buying trip of 1957 to fill one of Howey's desiderata; with the ownership stamp of the Société de Lecture de Genève and inscribed on the title-page "Donné par Monsieur Plantamour".

The Howey Economic History Collection includes 59 editions, issues, and translations of what is widely recognized as the first and greatest classic of modern economic thought.

During the three-quarters of a century following the gift of the Pliny, growth of the rare books collection proceeded slowly under the care of particularly interested members of the faculty. The most notable of these, Richard S. Howey of the Economics Department, began his book selecting life in 1930, continuing through the Great Depression and the succeeding lean and fat years until 1989, well after his retirement, reading catalogues and handing his recommendations to the library for order placement year after year, book after book, always with an eye to both future research use and price, each purchase adding to the holdings of economic history, history of economics, and social history. The impact of these individual selections upon the development of the library in general and the Department of Special Collections in particular has been even greater than the acquisition of the 40,000 volume economic and social history section of the John Crerar Library which was accomplished through his efforts in 1954.

The pre-1850 imprints selected by Prof. Howey now form the basis of the Howey Economic History Collection in the Department of Special Collections. Establishment of the collection broadened our long-standing interest in these subjects in Italy and Great Britain to include most major European countries and their overseas possessions. The Department's holdings in economic history now include over 15,000 volumes of broadsides, acts, speeches, pamphlets, journals and books. They include major works and minor ones, famous writers and those so obscure that not even their names are known. Some indication of the remarkable strength of this collection can be gained by measuring it against the benchmark collection for this subject, the Kress Library of Business and Economics at Harvard University—approximately 40% of the Howey holdings are not represented in that primary collection of economic history.

The Department also has very large holdings of manuscripts in economic history—for example, an Italian Renaissance Business Records collection associated with the Altoviti family and their connections (Landi, Sermatelli, Guicciardini) from Florence and Rome, 1542-1754; financial and legal papers of the East India Company, the Royal Fishery Company, the Bolton Company of Madeira wine merchants, and the Russia Company; the Fletcher of Saltoun collection of estate account-books, notes on agriculture, commonplace-books and family accounts, from Scotland, 1750-1806; partial archives of the notary Gaufridy, homme d'affaires to the Marquis de Sade, 1774-1800; and the Rubinstein collection (named for the first head of the Department of Special Collections and acquired through his generosity and that of Bernard M. Rosenthal) of legal papers, estate and business letter-books, account-books and inventories, and estate maps of the Orsetti family of Lucca, Italy, 1180-1874.

The 18th century, an area of interest to the Libraries as early as 1881, has become a period of particular concern to the Department. The collections of the Department include large numbers of English and French 18th century works, particularly in politics, economics, literature (particularly poems, plays, and English poetical miscellanies), and natural history. Our strength in English imprints of this period has made the Spencer Research Library a significant contributor to the international Eighteenth-Century Short-Title Catalogue, with records of some 30,000 books supplied to that census over the past few years.

Curll 1732-10F

Although Curll is not mentioned by name, at least three of the works being hung up to dry by the devils are Curll imprints—"Atalantis" is the almanac New Atalantis for the Year 1713 while "Cases of Impotency" and "Rochester's Poems" are both examples of Curll's 'soft porn' publications. Most of the other publications shown—Fog's Journal, The Craftsman, Hyp-Doctor, The Examiner, Free Briton, Daily Courant, Post Boy, Daily Post, Applebee's Journal, Read's Journal, London Journal, and the Weekly Register—are present in the Bond or Realey collections.

Among the many colorful figures of the 18th century was "the unspeakable Curll," a most prolific publisher and bookseller with well over a thousand books and pamphlets to his credit or discredit, a man almost constantly at war with Swift, Pope, or another of his involuntary authors (he was singularly unimpressed by the concept of literary property), and a very successful businessman. In 1955 the Library acquired Peter Murray Hill's private collection of 500 volumes of Edmund Curll, now built to over 800.

Of Curll's unwilling authors the best known is certainly Jonathan Swift, whose Meditation upon a Broomstick (first printed by Curll in 1710 from a manuscript obtained by theft) is one of the puzzles of the collection—scholarship has not yet been able to discover which of the two versions in the Curll Collection is earlier, the 16-page two penny edition or the 30-page six penny edition. Trials, scandals, topical poems, poetical miscellanies, politics, British antiquities, travels and the classics make up this collection of the stock that Curll felt would move well or could be made to move by being re-issued with a new and up-to-date title-page.

Acquired from Peter Murray Hill in 1985 through the Wallace Pratt fund.

Charles B. Realey, professor of history, bequeathed his library to the University and in 1963 his collection of Walpoliana came to the Department. The original two hundred volumes, now increased to nearly 500, provide a concentrated and remarkably full coverage of Sir Robert Walpole's administration (1721-1742). Complete sets of The Craftsman and of Cato's Letters, many clandestine and controversial pamphlets, and a sizable group of contemporary newspapers are particularly valuable additions to the Library's resources on the political life of the period.

John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, reforming Whigs, founded the London Journal and published in it the extremely controversial and anonymous letters signed "Cato" from November 1720 to July 1723. Gordon later became a member of Walpole's government.

This volume is mainly correspondence between Trenchard and Sir William Simpson, one of the barons of the Exchequer and an important political figure.

Phillipps MS 11763, acquired in the Sotheby sale of 15 June 1971.

The extensive manuscript collections of the department include much 18th century material—drafts of speeches by Queen Anne, correspondence such as that between John Trenchard and Sir William Simpson, military letters and reports, diplomatic notebooks, confidential diplomatic and secret service letters, and a variety of private papers.

The only known copy of the only known issue of this periodical.

From the library of Richmond P. and Marjorie N. Bond.

From no other source can a researcher gain so vivid and detailed a picture of this period as from the newspapers and periodicals of the day, and few sources are so elusive. Survival does not come easily to an old newspaper. The collection of Richmond P. and Marjorie N. Bond (acquired by the Department in 1970 with the help of Henry L. Snyder, professor of history) is the result of years of patient and knowledgeable searching. Begun as a teaching collection—a group of representative items illustrating the development of the English periodical press—it has grown into a research collection of uncommon value.

Of the more than 900 entries in the Bonds' original catalogue approximately one-fourth are concerned with Joseph Addison and Richard Steele—the Tatler and Spectator constitute the core of the collection, occurring in original form, in later editions, in varied formats. Letters, contemporary pamphlets, and other works connected with Addison and Steele add to the research value of this portion of the collection. Well over two hundred other journals published before 1800 are included, with many of the eminent journals in complete or good files and many other papers represented by a few issues. Ranging from the "newsbooks" of the Civil War period through the Popish Plot era (the Observator and others), the post-Revolutionary Present State of Europe, and the great age of the periodical, the 18th century, the collection includes almanacs, parliamentary debates, provincial papers, essay journals, review journals, and what can only be described as general magazines. Some items are very well known—the Connoisseur (the Bond copy has been annotated by John Boyle, 5th earl of Cork, one of the contributors), Dr. Johnson's Rambler, the Ladies Diary, the Flying Post, the Daily Courant; many are obscure—Jopson's Coventry Mercury, the Lady's Curiosity; some are extremely uncommon—News from the Dead, Free Holder, The General Magazine.

The collection continues to grow, supported in great part by the continuing generosity of Mrs. Bond, increasing in variety, importance and usefulness. A few of the additions to the collection since its acquisition are The Scotish Dove Sent Out, and Returning, no. 44, 9-16 August 1644 (one of two known copies; from the Sotheby sale of the Fairfax Library, 14 December 1993), L'Estrange's Intelligencer (a gift of the KU Friends of the Library), scientific journals such as The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (begun in 1664 and still publishing), business newspapers such as Lloyd's Evening Post, as well as many other journals which strengthen the original topics of the collection.

Perhaps the most common form of publication of the 18th century was the pamphlet. Every conceivable subject and nearly every 18th century figure of any note was discussed in a pamphlet, or more commonly in a series of pamphlets. We have, over the years, assembled large numbers of these invaluable sources—poetical, dramatic, political and economic, and religious pamphlets. We have generally attempted to obtain them unbound, with the secondary aim of using them for bibliographical study. Particularly important collections added to our 18th century holdings are the Robert D. Horn Collection of contemporary poems on the 1st Duke of Marlborough (over 150 satires and panegyrics, purchased from the collector in 1976) which complements the already very strong holdings on Queen Anne and her great general, and the Brodie of Brodie Collection, purchased in 1961, of about 1200 pamphlets (mainly 18th century, including many Scottish imprints) collected by the Brodie family of Elgin over some 150 years.

From the Frank E. Melvin collection; acquired from Martinus Nijhoff in 1952.

The Frank E. Melvin Collection of French Revolutionary Pamphlets (named in honor of a member of the History Department) was begun in 1952 with a large acquisition from Martinus Nijhoff. The bulk of the ten thousand pamphlets was published between 1787 and 1800 and covers the struggles between the King and the parlements from 1787 to 1789, the reaction of the clergy to the religious reforms of the National (Constituent) Assembly, issues concerned with governmental finances and with the drawing up of the Constitution of 1791, the reorganization and financing of the army from 1789 through the period of National Convention, the trial of Louis XVI, the Thermidorian reaction, and the period of the Directory (1795 to 1799). There are many interesting editions of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Republican Calendar. The literary forms employed by the famous, obscure, and anonymous authors are almost as varied as the questions they treat: reasoned political essay, didactic narrative, verse, song, dialogue and drama -- all are considered appropriate to political argument.

Supplementary collections of pamphlets concerning revolutionary activities in other parts of Europe at approximately the same date add several hundred items to this group of sources for the study of one of the most important periods of European history.

The Esher-Randle-Keynes-Spoerri copy.

In 1953, with the acquisition of the James Joyce collection of the Chicago book collector James F. Spoerri, the library began what became one of its major collecting interests, Ireland.

The Spoerri Joyce collection was extremely strong in printed material in both book and periodical form, including all first editions of Joyce's works except five minor items printed for copyright purposes which exist in only one, two or three copies. Particularly uncommon items in the original collection, which has been considerably increased in the years since, were Gas from a Burner, the elusive Cleveland, 1931, edition of Pomes Penyeach, and a copy of the first edition in French of Ulysses, signed by Stuart Gilbert, who oversaw the translation, and inscribed by Joyce to his daughter Lucia on the date of issue.

I write it out in a verse—
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

W.B. Yeats. Sept. 25, 1916

The Rising in Dublin and Proclamation of the Irish Republic took place on Easter Monday, April 24, 1916, and between May 3 and 9, Padraic Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh, Joseph Plunkett, John MacBride, Thomas Clarke and other of the leaders were executed. On 11 May, 1916, Yeats wrote to Lady Gregory from London, where he was then living: "The Dublin tragedy has been a great sorrow and anxiety . . . I am trying to write a poem on the men executed--'terrible beauty has been born again' . . . I had no idea that any public event could so deeply move me--and I am very despondent about the future." The poem is dated 25 September, 1916, but it would appear from the letter to Lady Gregory that Yeats had been working on it for some months.

From the P. S. O'Hegarty collection.

In 1955 the University of Kansas Libraries purchased from P.S. O'Hegarty his outstanding collection of books, pamphlets and periodicals of W.B. Yeats. The collection arrived here at KU just a month before O'Hegarty's death in December 1955. Some time later his widow asked if we would be interested in buying the main part of his collection. We were, and on March 26, 1959, there came from the Library loading dock to the desk of the Director of Libraries a message reading "At about 8:20 a.m., 11 tons of books . . ."

The W. B. Yeats collection is a remarkably rich one: all of Yeats' works in first edition except the very scarce Mosada (1886) and The Hour-Glass (1903), with many later and variant editions and printings; books edited or containing contributions by Yeats; several score of books from his personal library (including copies of his own works with his annotations) or having close association in one way or another with the Yeats family; runs of periodicals with which he was associated, such as Samhain, The Arrow, Shanachie, and Dana; many single issues of periodicals in which material by or about Yeats appeared, including particularly elusive journals such as the Kilkenny Monitor and the Irish Home Reading Magazine; and a substantial collection of correspondence between Yeats and his editor, A.H. Bullen, as well as a large number of family letters and the publications of other members of this talented family.

The University's dealings with Mr. O'Hegarty began with a literary subject—the W.B. Yeats collection—and the acquisition of the remainder of his library showed that Yeats was certainly not an isolated literary interest. The collection includes books from Swift, Sheridan and Sterne to Wilde, Yeats, and Sean O'Casey—an author also represented in the Spencer Library by a collection donated by Franklin P. Murphy, former chancellor of the University—and much more from the Irish literary renaissance: many figures other than Yeats, the Abbey Theatre plays, an extensive group of over 160 Abbey Theatre programs ranging from 1904 to 1922, the plays of Synge and Lady Gregory, and the complete output of the Dun Emer and Cuala presses, including the broadsides and other ephemera.

Often when talking about a major library collection one mentions the collector or donor quickly in passing, perhaps because little is known about him or her, or because there is not enough to say that is relevant to the collection. In the case of P.S. O'Hegarty we know quite a lot about the man himself and we can see that both his life and his intellectual involvement in the building and use of the collection make him an essential part of the story. He may be taken as the type of the collector and the story of the building of his collection as a representation of what lies behind so many of the collections now in our library.

Patrick Sarsfield O'Hegarty was born on the 29th of December, 1879, at Carrignavar, Cork. He entered the British General Post Office service in Cork in 1897 and in 1902 went to the London headquarters office where he served eleven years. During this time he was active in many Irish organizations. In 1913 he returned to Ireland as Postmaster of Cobh, a port of some importance and a British naval station. Four days after the beginning of World War I in 1914, O'Hegarty, a known propagandist and rebel, was removed from this potentially sensitive location and moved to Wales. He was not permitted to return to Ireland for the duration of the war.

In 1918 he refused to take the British Oath of Allegiance and resigned his position, returning to Ireland to take over the Irish Book Shop in Dublin where he established something of an intellectual center. He became widely known in Sinn Fein and Gaelic League circles; he was a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood for a number of years, and served on the Supreme Council of the IRB at the time of the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921.

In 1922 he was appointed Secretary of the Irish General Post Office, and when the Department of Posts and Telegraphs was formed he became its Secretary, the equivalent of Postmaster General, and retained that position until his retirement in 1944. He was elected a member of the Irish Academy of Letters in 1954, and died on December 17, 1955.

O'Hegarty was a life-long book collector. He frequently wrote in his books the date on which he acquired them. The earliest of these dates noted so far is January 1903, written in a copy of John Dillon's biography of John Mitchel. He also added notes on the endpapers of books, pointing out and indexing matters of particular interest, and especially of Irish interest. Very many periodicals, anthologies, and the like have extensive manuscript notes indicating Irish authors and themes.

In addition to collecting books, O'Hegarty was himself a productive author. His first book, in 1917, was a biography of John Mitchel, followed by four other books of political interest and, finally, his major work The history of Ireland under the Union, 1801-1922, published in 1952. He also edited a number of periodicals—An t'Éireannach (The Irishman) for the Gaelic League in 1913, Irish Freedom for the Irish Republican Brotherhood from 1913 until it was suppressed in 1914, and The Separatist under the sponsorship of the IRB Supreme Council in 1922—and maintained a flow of articles in other periodicals and newspapers, and compiled a large number of individual author bibliographies, including those covering the leaders of the 1916 Rebellion.

Although O'Hegarty's collecting interests included many subjects the real strength of the P.S. O'Hegarty library lies in the Irish material and within that in the political history of the 19th century. There are only a very few items in the collection from the 17th century, a period of little printing in Ireland. The 18th century is a different matter however, and the collection has around a thousand examples. The great majority is from Dublin, but there are also examples from Cork, Limerick, Newry, Waterford and Belfast. The eighteenth-century holdings include Dublin editions of English authors, and Dublin piracies of London editions, histories of the theatre in Dublin, very many plays, and a number of poetical miscellanies, as well as the expected preponderance of political material. It is at the very end of the century that the real strength of the collection begins to become obvious with the several editions of Richard Robert Madden's The United Irishmen, their life and times (concerning the revolutionary movement, founded in 1791, which was responsible for the 1798 Rebellion and the subsequent 1803 rising) and transcripts of the trials of Robert Emmet and other rebels of 1803 as well as materials concerning Daniel O'Connell, winner of Catholic emancipation and fighter for Repeal of the Union -- everything from general biographies to copies of funeral orations given in Rome, Dublin and New York.

37. The Spirit of the Nation. Ballads and songs by the writers of "The Nation", with original and ancient music, arranged for the voice and piano-forte, Dublin: James O'Duffy, 1845.

This collection of poetry of the Young Irelanders was signed at Clonmel Prison on 13 November 1848 by Thomas Francis Meagher, Terrence Bellew McManus, Patrick O'Donoghue (who adds "The day on which I was sentenced to be hanged"), and William Smith O'Brien. All four were in fact sentenced to death for their part as ringleaders in the 1848 rising but the sentences were commuted to penal servitude and transportation.

O'Hegarty collected examples of the posters advertising shipping which brought so many Irish to this country at the time of the great potato blight famine of 1845 to 1849, when a million died and a million and a half emigrated. His collection also includes O'Rourke's history of the famine, a curious pamphlet published in 1847, entitled The potato blight famine: questions and replies between two travellers, on its causes and results which stresses the dangers attending on reliance upon a single crop, and material from yet another poorly organized and quickly aborted rising, that of the Young Irelanders in 1848.

A confidential police report of the activities of Ribbonmen (an agrarian secret society), Orangemen (a Protestant society with a history of sectarian violence), and Fenians (a militant republican organization) in 1864 serves as preface to the 1867 rising, which, as O'Hegarty writes, was "an almost bloodless failure." The collection includes reports of the trials of participants, and material on the Manchester Martyrs, three Fenians executed for the murder of a police sergeant during the jailbreak of the leaders of the rising.

The first book O'Hegarty wrote was his biography of John Mitchel, and a biography of Mitchel was an early acquisition of his, back in 1903. The collection is strong in Mitchel material: the United Irishman (his newspaper which advocated passive resistance and perhaps stronger methods in agrarian conflict, and which led him to a treason-felony prosecution), the report of his trial, his Jail journal, a classic of prison literature, and his history of Ireland. There is much about Parnell: the Special Commission proceedings, the biography by his widow, attacks from Catholic partisans, cartoons, a measured and anonymous assessment which concludes "that Mr. Parnell's death seems something of a providential character," and the sale catalogue of his library ten years after his death.

O'Hegarty was very close to the events of the new century, although he was virtually deported for the war years. His collection includes works by Arthur Griffith, founder of Sinn Fein; John Redmond, the carry-over from Parnell and out of step with prevailing ideas; Erskine Childers, author and patriot, involved in gunrunning into Howth in 1914, and eventually executed by Free State forces during the Civil War in 1922; James Connolly, founder of the Irish Socialist Republican Party, and signer of the Proclamation of the Republic in 1916; Patrick Pearse, commander-in-chief at the Easter Rising; and surely the most important and exciting piece of paper in modern Irish history, a copy of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic that was distributed on April 24, 1916.

In spite of O'Hegarty's especial involvement and interest in the political history of Ireland, the scope of his collection extended to everything Irish. There are works on the history of religion, particularly significant in Ireland, the topography and resources of the country, many accounts of individual families, towns and parishes, and a rich representation of periodicals.

Not all the collection was of Irish interest, for O'Hegarty had a catholic taste in books. He was interested in "penny dreadfuls," the weekly or monthly part-publications popular in Britain during the second half of last century, and notorious for lurid plots and illustrations, in boys' magazines, and in standard boys' fiction of the latter half of last century, such as G.A. Henty (at least 72 titles), R.M. Ballantyne, W.H.G. Kingston, and most of the major authors of this genre.

D3095

The opening page of No. 1 of this series of penny dreadfuls devoted to the career of Charles Peace, "thief, master of disguises, and murderer," which was published within weeks of his execution in 1879.

The preliminary page facing page 1 of No. 1 includes Peace's scaffold speech and a list of "Books for the Million. Price 2d. each" available from the same publisher.

From the Kevin Carpenter collection.

The Spencer Library's popular literature collections were strengthened by the purchase in 1987 of the Kevin Carpenter collection of some 550 titles of British dime novels and penny-part novels, along with single issues and runs of thirty-five similar periodicals. The collector is a member of the Faculty of English at the University of Oldenburg and both curator and author of the catalogue of a major exhibition of penny dreadfuls from the Oldenburg collection shown in London in 1983.

The Tom Swift adventure series (one of many such series in the children's book collection) was written mainly by Edward Stratemeyer, using the house pseudonym, Victor Appleton.

Gift of Henry Fullenwider, professor of German.

The Children's Collection is not a selective collection of great children's literature but deliberately inclusive, attempting to provide a cross-section of what was available for children to read. Built almost totally by gift, this strong collection of over 8,000 children's and young people's books, mainly American and English 19th and early 20th century, includes enlightening works to be read at home after school with examples of piety to rival the mediaeval saints offered as models of conduct— one poor early 19th century child lived a life of sin and expired in affecting repentance at the tender age of four —as well as more entertaining fare such as E. Nesbit's unsurpassable fancies, Tom Swift's scientific adventures, and the exploits of Nancy Drew, girl detective.

In 1965 the Library received by bequest the library of James H. Stewart, one of the founding members of the Wichita Bibliophiles, who was particularly interested in fantasy fiction. The Stewart Collection includes most of the novels and short stories of Arthur Machen and a fine run of the fantasy magazine Weird Tales as well as a valuable collection of bibliography and modern fine printing.

First Ace edition; originally published by Avon in 1962.

Gift of the Larry Friesen fund.

Gift of James E. Alloway, November 1984.

H. Beam Piper, whose popularity remains almost undiminished thirty years after his death, committed suicide in November 1964. His long-time agent, Kenneth S. White, to whom Piper dedicated Little Fuzzy, had died suddenly, carrying his business records, which he had kept in his memory only, into death with him. Piper was left destitute—he had been reduced to shooting pigeons from his window to supplement his diet—and depressed from the rejection of a third Fuzzy novel, unaware that White had recently sold some of his work, and convinced that his writing career was over.

Founded in 1969, with the first installment of an annual gift from an alumnus, Larry Friesen, for the purchase of science-fiction paperbacks, the Department's collection of science fiction is its most active popular literature collection. James E. Gunn, emeritus professor of English and founder of the KU Center for the Study of Science Fiction, has not only supported the collection by generous gifts of books and periodicals and the deposit of his own papers but has persuaded others to support it as well. Through his efforts the library became a North American repository for World SF (the organization of overseas science fiction writers and publishers, which has presented us with science fiction from Europe, Latin America, Israel, and the Far East), the official repository for the archives of the Science Fiction Research Association, and one of the recipients of new science fiction books from the Science Fiction Writers of America.

Science fiction became popular in pulp short story magazines like this one, of which the collection has dozens. Its initial success can be attributed almost solely to the efforts of the first and most persistent of its magazine editors, Hugo Gernsback, for whom one of the most important science fiction awards was named.

From the John Ryley collection.

Built almost entirely by gifts (both materials and funds), the collection has grown very rapidly, developing remarkable strength in science fiction periodicals dating from the 1920's to the mid-50s— derived largely from the collections of James Gunn, John Ryley, Ben Jason, and P. Schuyler Miller, long-time book review editor for Astounding. Lloyd Currey has contributed many books, Richard DeLap left us his library, and local collectors make frequent gifts of paperbacks and magazines.

MS226

Lee Killough, a science fiction writer who is an X-ray technician in the Veterinary School at Kansas State University, Manhattan, is particularly scrupulous in working out the physical environments in which her science fiction is set. Among the most intriguing items of her papers are her extensive "background books", detailing the geography, zoology, social structure, meteorology and other details of the setting.

Deposited by Lee Killough, October 1986.

The Department's largest groups of science fiction manuscripts are the entire surviving science fiction archives of Cordwainer Smith, and the papers of James Gunn and Lloyd Biggle. Biggle has not only deposited his own science fiction archives in the library but arranged for the gift of literary manuscripts of T.L. Sherred and J. Hunter Holly, and brought us several hundred oral history tapes from the Science Fiction Oral History Association. Lee Killough has made us her official archival repository and many other authors, including Theodore Sturgeon and Thomas A. Easton, have committed papers to the Spencer Library.

Acquired in 1990 from Bertram Rota, with support from the English Department.

Gift of Milton F. Barlow.

In December 1982, Milton F. Barlow of Kansas City donated his Mark Twain collection to the library. Some sixty books in all, the collection was made up mainly of first editions of Twain, such as The Celebrated Jumping Frog, his anti-vivisection tract The Pains of Lowly Life and the very ephemeral Speech on Accident Insurance, his appearance in periodicals such as the December 1866 issue of Harper's which contains Mark Swain's [!] "Forty-three Days in an Open Boat", and even a piracy, the Toronto edition of The Prince and the Pauper with its pointed preface justifying piracy. In addition it included the typescript of the first ten chapters—the eleventh and last is at the Bancroft Library—of "Tom Sawyer, Detective". A notable piece of supporting material was Merle Johnson's interleaved copy of his A Bibliography of the Work of Mark Twain, 1910, with many manuscript additions.

B5638

An advertisement for one of Mark Twain's inventions, a "self-pasting scrapbook".

Gift of Milton Barlow.

One unexpected consequence of Mr. Barlow's gift was the discovery that the library already owned far more than we had realized of Mark Twain's works, some five dozen items, including a copy of his 1873 patent for an improvement in scrapbooks and an example of the scrapbook itself.

One of the University's most generous donors was Sallie Casey Thayer, remembered chiefly for her donations of art to the infant KU Museum of Art but also a benefactor of the library. Her copy of the second printing of Tom remains our earliest despite serious searching for the first printing, which we feel Mr. Barlow's standards require must be in the original cloth.

Annotated on the back "An X-Ray photograph of H. L. Mencken, the critic and editor of Smart Set. Thought to be the first use of the Roentgen rays for portraiture. June—1921."

MS 165A: 20, 25, 29, 49, 61, 65 and 69

A selection of the letters to Driscoll which inspired Mrs. Snyder to begin collecting Mencken.

Gift of Elizabeth Morrison Snyder.

Elizabeth Morrison Snyder of Shawnee Mission, Kansas, began her Mencken collection in 1951 with the acquisition of a substantial collection of letters from H.L. Mencken to Charles B. Driscoll (an alumnus of the University of Kansas and once the editor of the Wichita Eagle) and a group of inscribed editions of Mencken's works, including a fine set of the American Mercury with Driscoll's bookplates, from Driscoll's library. In the two decades which followed, working with Herbert West, Allen Schultz of Smith's Bookstore in Baltimore, John Van E. Kohn, Jake Zeitlin, and other booksellers, she built a collection of remarkable balance and completeness, with some 250 Mencken letters, 75 inscribed editions of his books, files of The Smart Set and The American Mercury, and an extensive collection of ephemera written and published by Mencken.

HLM C267

Extensively annotated by Mencken, e.g., "This is so bad that I am reduced to silence! M", and with his presentation inscriptions first to Charles Gordon and later to Frank Hogan. According to Gordon, this was the first copy off the press on 6 June 1903 and was taken by him to Mencken; only 100 copies were printed, 50 being turned over to Mencken and the press retaining 50, 35 of which were burned up in the great Baltimore fire of February 1904.

Presented to the Library in 1971 and increased since by further gifts from Mrs. Snyder, the Mencken collection includes such rarities as Ventures into Verse of 1903 (two of the 37 known copies), George Bernard Shaw: His Plays (1905), A Little Book in C Major (1916), and extensive files of Mencken's newspaper columns.

Mrs. Snyder is also the founder and supporter of the Snyder Student Bookcollecting Contest, a competition first announced in 1957. Many of the alumni of this student contest are now still collecting and some came home two years ago to help Mrs. Snyder celebrate the thirty-fifth anniversary of the contest.

Number 1 of Terrence Williams' broadside series "T.Wms."

Presented to the library by the author.

Begun in 1963 by Terrence Williams, then a member of the department, and Edward F. Grier, professor of English (to whom we are also indebted for his development of our Walt Whitman holdings), with the intention of preserving the ephemeral productions of the local anti-establishment poets, the New American Poetry collection has solidified under the attentions of Robert W. Melton, the KU Libraries' English and American literature bibliographer, into the collection of a particular set of movements in contemporary American poetry. Often taking a fugitive and fragile form but sometimes coming out as fashionable limited editions, the publications stem mainly from four schools: the Black Mountain College group, the poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, the New York "Beats", and the Kansas Connection. The several thousand items of the collection include issues of over 500 separate little magazines and the productions of many small presses, including Terrence Williams' own.

A 28-card adjustable verse, issued in a cloth bag in a plexiglass case.

Acquired from the publisher by the English Department.

While attempting to provide as broad and representative a selection as possible, we place special emphasis on poets who have had some connection with the local scene—Kansas poets such as Michael McClure, Charles Plymell, Ken Irby, William Stafford, Ronald Johnson, and the adopted Kansan, William Burroughs, and frequent visitors such as Allen Ginsberg.

The most recent addition of a Kansas poet to the collections is the library of Max Douglas, a promising young KU poet who died in 1970 at the age of 21. The Douglas Collection, presented to the Library by the poet's father in 1982, is strong in the Black Mountain and San Francisco poets, and includes Douglas' own posthumously published poems.

Acquired in 1963 from the Phoenix Bookshop.

The department also collects the manuscripts and papers of post-World War II American poets, not all writing in the same genres as those of the New American Poetry collection although our strongest holdings do come from those schools. We have, for example, letters of Allen Ginsberg, large groups of the papers of Ronald Johnson and of William Burroughs, and notebooks of Gregory Corso. Three who do not fall into those categories are Robert Peters, an academic and dramatic poet working in the Los Angeles area, whose papers (acquired through funds from the English Department) include massive correspondence with almost every American poet working today, Larry Eigner, and Kirby Congdon, who designated the library the official archives of his papers years ago and sends frequent shipments of his work.

56. Poems by Two Brothers, London: W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, and J. and J. Jackson, Louth, 1827.

Tennyson's first book, written with his brother, Charles. The "Advertisement" states "The following Poems were written from the ages of fifteen to eighteen, not conjointly, but individually". No authors' names appear in the publication, but Charles Tennyson, to whom this copy once belonged, has provided an attribution for each poem by annotating the table of contents "A" or "C" (Alfred or Charles).

Bequest of W.D. Paden.

In 1979, the Department was bequeathed the library of Prof. William Doremus Paden of the KU English Department, completing a gift begun in 1972. Particularly important in the Paden gift are his remarkable Tennyson collection with its rich resources for the bibliographical history of Tennyson's publications, and his strong holdings in the Pre-Raphaelites and A.E.W. O'Shaughnessy.

The Tennyson collection begins with his earliest published work, Poems by Two Brothers (1827). It includes a complete run of In Memoriam in all its numbered editions (1-20) and many subsequent unnumbered ones as well, many in multiple states. It also contains an impressive array—beginning with the first state of the first edition—of the various transmogrifications of the Idylls of the King, nicely illustrating both the literary and the bibliographical evolution of this monumental sequence of poems. Seven variant issues of the first edition of Enoch Arden provide examples of the fine distinctions of binding stamps, broken letters, sewers' marks and publishers' catalogues bound-in which are the material of the descriptive bibliographer's craft. Accompanying these is what the eminent bibliographer Thomas J. Wise called the "prepublication state", entitled Idylls of the Hearth and now known to be a Wise forgery. It is perhaps this publication which turned Paden's attention to the career of Wise, on whom he published extensively.

Bequest of W.D. Paden.

In addition to the central Tennyson collection, W.D. Paden's library was rich in the Pre-Raphaelites, including a large number of letters and memorabilia of the painter Holman Hunt. Hunt was a founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848, a close friend of the Rossettis, Millais and Ruskin, and moved widely in artistic circles.

58. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Poems, London: F.S. Ellis, 1870.

In 1862 Dante Gabriel Rossetti buried the manuscript of his poems in the grave of his wife, Lizzie, and turned to painting instead. In 1868 he began writing love poems again. He dug up the manuscript of his early poems in 1869, and in 1870 he published both sets in his first volume of poems, which was reasonably well received.

Gift of W.D. Paden.

Of his own writing Rossetti says "I have been doing a good deal of work in poetry and shall publish a volume in the Spring. I have got 230 pages in print & want perhaps to add about a 100 more" and refers to it as "the best work of my life such as that has been." Poems of 1870, to which he is referring, ended up with 282 pages.

The Paden bequest, combined with the department's previous (and subsequent) Pre-Raphaelite acquisitions, has given us very substantial holdings, both printed and manuscript, in this poetic and artistic movement. Among the most substantial of the manuscript materials are the numerous letters of the Rossetti family and other members of the Pre-Raphaelite circle to the artist, Frederic Shields, and the Pauline Trevelyan journals and sketchbooks.

Lady Pauline Trevelyan, wife of Sir Walter Calverley Trevelyan, was the center of a coterie of Pre-Raphaelites who often visited her home, Wallington Hall—Ruskin, William Bell Scott, Swinburne, Millais, and others. She took an intelligent interest in art, literature, science and technology, and was a good amateur artist herself. She spent much time traveling in Great Britain and Europe, particularly in Italy, and kept journals full of detail, with small sketches in the text. Her sketchbooks are scattered between 1834 and 1866 and complement her journals to some extent.

Emily Driscoll, from whom the library acquired the collection, was one of the booksellers who worked most closely with Paden.

61. Two photographs by Maynard L. Parker of Frank Lloyd Wright's Barndall Hollyhock House, Los Angeles, 1917.

Wright P:I:3:2 & 4

Gift of Elizabeth Gordon Norcross.

The Frank Lloyd Wright Collection has been built largely through the efforts of Curtis Besinger, a Taliesin Fellow from 1939 to 1955 and now KU Professor Emeritus of Architecture. Since the collection was begun in 1969 he has been an extraordinarily generous donor, has advised us on the development of the collection, and persuaded others to contribute as well. The collection is made up of books by and about Wright, over a thousand photographs (most of them the gift of Elizabeth Gordon Norcross, former editor of House Beautiful) of his buildings and of life at Taliesin (particularly Taliesin West), a great many clippings and rare printed ephemera, such as Taliesin Eyes, the little newsletter printed by the Taliesin Fellows, and architectural drawings made by Curtis Besinger when he was a member of Wright's staff.

In 1934, George and Helen Beal became the first husband and wife team of Taliesin fellows. Mrs. Beal was adopted as surrogate big sister or aunt to a whole generation of the Fellows and they continued to correspond with her, and with Professor Beal to a lesser degree, for decades. The extensive collection of letters reveals Frank Lloyd Wright and his teaching methods through his students' eyes -- rather a different view from that of the official biographies.

For many years the collecting of voyages and travels, maps and atlases has been a leading interest of the Library. Travel accounts, atlases, and geographies can be found in almost every collection in the Department while maps occur both as illustrations in books and as separate sheets. Our earliest printed map is the "T-O" map of the world (the oldest known printed map) in the 1472 edition of Isidore's Etymologiae, while our earliest map showing any part of the Americas is the Johan Ruysch map of the world in Ptolemy's Geographia (Rome, 1508). The collections include many atlases such as the Ortelius Theatrum Orbis Terrarum of 1612, a Blaeu atlas of China of 1655, books of cities and collections of city plans such as the handsome Civitates Orbis Terrarum of Braun and Hogenberg (Cologne, 1572-1618) and collections of voyages like Purchas His Pilgrimes (London, 1625-1626), De Bry's Reisen im Occidentalischen Indien (Frankfurt, 1590-1630), and the first collected edition of Dampier's voyages (London, 1729).

The gift of Kenneth A. Spencer.

Formerly in the libraries of William Bates, Henry Harley, Charles Singer, and Mortimer L. Schiff.

Henry Smith was an English attorney who killed his man in a duel and had to flee the country. In Portugal he joined the army under Wellington for a short time and then returned to England for his trial; he was discharged. His diary is filled with observations of Portuguese and Spanish customs (which he tends to compare unfavorably with their English counterparts) and nicely done watercolors of architecture, people in their working costumes, and military structures, with some careful battle plans.

Acquired from Henry Bristow in 1973.

The collection includes many reports of individual journeys such as Wied-Neuwied's Travels in the Interior of North America (London, 1843-1844) with its magnificent Bodmer illustrations of North American Indians, Herberstein's Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii, of which we have five 16th century editions; and Breydenbach's Peregrinatio in Terram Sanctam (1486) with its folding views of notable cities of the Mediterranean area. A special emphasis has been placed on collecting travel and expedition diaries, ranging from a 15th century Alpine-crossing itinerary to 20t