Kansas University is an unlikely place for a collection of Irish literature.
But KU’s Spencer Research Library actually boasts one the largest collections of Irish literature outside of Ireland, said special collections librarian Karen Cook.
There are more than 25,000 items in all: books, newspapers, propaganda pamphlets and more, covering Irish history from the 17th to the 20th centuries.
KU started purchasing the items in the 1950s.
“It was affordable, or more so than works from the Renaissance period,” Cook said.
In 1959, KU purchased an Irish man’s entire private library, one of the biggest of its kind in Ireland and one of the largest additions to the university’s collection. Since then, the university has continuously added items, specifically through the Rosemary A. McDonough Fund for Irish Literature, created in 2000.
“What we really want to look for are things that are unique in some way,” Cook said.
She referred to manuscripts and printed works with inscriptions. Almost everything in the collection is an original document.
“Students really like that they can see the stuff for real,” professor Kathryn Conrad said. “We’re talking about some text and then we send them over there to look at it.”
Conrad teaches both undergraduate and graduate English classes with a focus on Irish literature. Besides sending her students to dig around in the collection, she’s used it for her own research.
“I was doing a research project on 19th century Irish folklore practices and I wondered if Spencer Library had anything I needed,” she said. “It had everything. It’s really a treasure trove of material that a lot of people haven’t really explored.”
Cook hopes that will change.
“You can’t imagine how many students go through KU without really knowing what’s in this building,” she said. “We can see so many things on the Internet but the actual physical object of a book, especially one so old, has magic to it.”
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cait48 (anonymous) says…
It must be very difficult researching native Irish folklore practices from that time period considering that early in that century Irish cultural laws forbidding speaking Gaelic and the teaching of pre-Englisg Irish history were still in effect . Had it not been for the shanachies, who quite literally taught their pupils on the sly and only by word of mouth, much of native Irish history and folklore would have been lost. I'm not clear on what changed the climate and policy but at least it was saved until Ladies Gregory and Wilde appeared and began writing these tales down to preserve them.,