Literature

English Literature

The largest portion of the literary collections is English literature of the British Isles, including Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. Among the most significant holdings are two 15th-century manuscripts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; an important group of 16th-and 17th-century poetical commonplace books; more than 450 books and pamphlets by Daniel Defoe, including the rare first edition of Robinson Crusoe; the largest extant collection of Robert Burns’s letters, manuscripts, and early editions; one of the world’s most important Lewis Carroll collections, including more than 600 of his letters, his early drawings, his own copy of the very rare first edition of Alice in Wonderland, and his rarest photographs; Bram Stoker’s autograph notes and outlines for Dracula; the manuscripts of two-thirds of Joseph Conrad’s literary works, including Lord Jim, and 60 letters in his hand; and the manuscript of James Joyce’s Ulysses.

American Literature

American literature includes first editions of Anne Bradstreet, Phillis Wheatley, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, presentation copies of books by Herman Melville housed in a bookcase that once belonged to him; 19th-century dime novels; and first editions and letters of Emily Dickinson and Christopher Morley. The single largest collection, that of the poet Marianne Moore, encompasses her personal and literary papers, including correspondence with contemporaries such as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, and Langston Hughes; as well as her working library, which spans a wide range of subjects, including literature, religion, art history, natural history, and sports.

Continental Literature

Chief among these holdings is a group of Cervantes’s works, including the first edition of Don Quixote, Dr. Rosenbach’s favorite book, and documents in Cervantes’s hand. The Continental Literature collection also includes a complete, 56-volume copy of George Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon’s Histoire naturelle, générale et particuliére with 2,978 plates; a presentation copy of Erasmus’s Novum Testamentum (1519) with woodcuts by Hans Holbein; and small but significant holdings in French literature, ranging from an illuminated manuscript of Guillaume de Deguilleville’s Trois pélerinages (1437) to manuscripts of Emile Zola and Anatole France and the rare second edition of Jean Cocteau’s Le Livre Blanc, illustrated by Cocteau and including one of his original drawings.