Special collections & collections of note
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All featured collections
The description of featured collections is an ongoing project.
Special collection materials must be consulted in a designated onsite library reading room.
Notable collections include materials that may be borrowed.
All featured collections
Collection groups and major special collections
Collection group webpages provide overviews of collections in particular subject areas. They may include special, notable, and general collections from throughout the Penn Libraries.
Major special collection webpages highlight collections with particular scope and significance.
Special collections
Special collections include rare books, manuscripts, and other materials identified as significant. These collections must be consulted in a designated onsite library reading room.
Request to view special collections materialsNotable collections
Notable collections include materials from throughout the Penn Libraries, not limited to designated special collections.
These collections include materials that may be borrowed.
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Collections by library
Albrecht Music Library
The Otto E. Albrecht Music Library and Eugene Ormandy Music and Media Center house scores, books on music history and theory, ethnomusicology, jazz, popular music, sound and video recordings. The Kislak Center for Special Collections houses the rare music and collections, including the papers of Marian Anderson, Rudolf Serkin, Alma Mahler Werfel, Eugene Ormandy, Leopold Stokowski, and the Musical Fund Society, Savoy Company, and Marlboro Music Festival.
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Annenberg School for Communication Library
The Annenberg School for Communication Library Archives’ collections comprise materials pertaining to communication scholarship, journalism, and broadcast media. Holdings currently include, among other things, the papers of George Gerbner and Elihu Katz, the International Communication Association records, around 50,000 daytime and primetime television scripts from the 1950s through the 1990s, and a growing number of oral histories.
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Area Studies
Penn’s Area Studies Collections encompass materials in African, Chinese, Japanese, Judaic, Korean, Latin American, Middle Eastern, Russian, and South Asian studies, representing the study of more than half of the world’s population. Our special collections boast the largest number of Indic manuscripts and Japanese illustrated books in the Western hemisphere, a unique archive of more than 100,000 archaeological photographs, and an extensive array of colonial-era travelogues from South Asia. In addition, Penn holds manuscripts in Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish from the medieval to modern era; rare printed material from the 19th and 20th centuries from the Middle East and Japan; and a large number of rare works by noted European Orientalists. Growing collections include East Asian comics, colonial-era items from Manchuria, and ephemera in Middle Eastern languages.
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Chemistry Library
The Chemistry Library houses print materials that support the teaching and cutting-edge research taking place in Penn's Chemistry Department; as a result, the focus of the collection changes slightly as the research program evolves. In general, however, we collect in the broad areas of organic, inorganic, physical, theoretical, and biological chemistry. The full research collection includes over 200 current electronic subscriptions to chemistry-specific journals, and full runs of most core chemistry journals are available in either print or electronic format. Monographs, collected in either print or electronic format, provide solid background information that supports the Chemistry Department's primary research interests, and the monograph collection is especially strong in organic synthesis and natural products chemistry.
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Fisher Fine Arts Library
The Fisher Fine Arts Library's Rare Books and Special holds approximately three thousand rare books as well as drawings and historic maps. The foundation of the collection is the single great book of Vitruvius Pollio (ca. 90-20 B.C.E.) together with works by the five figures from the Renaissance period: Alberti, Scamozzi, Serlio, Vignola, and Palladio. The original collection was established in 1965 by G. Holmes Perkins who served as Dean of Penn's Graduate School of Fine Arts (today's Weitzman School of Design) from 1951 to 1971. While the charter collection is grounded in architecture, city planning, and historic preservation, it has since grown to reflect new areas of study and research within arts and design disciplines.
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Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts
With over 300,000 printed books and codices and over 14,000 linear feet of modern manuscripts, the Kislak Center’s collections span the ancient world to the contemporary era and are global in scope. The collections are interdisciplinary and continue to grow. Particular strengths include but are not limited to medieval and early modern Europe; South Asia; the history of science; and American letters and publishing.
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Levy Dental Medicine Library
The Dental Library is home to many curiosities in the form of texts and notable characters from the past. Among the Library’s holdings are a couple of firsts: the first printed book on Dentistry (1530) and the seminal book, Le Chirurgien Dentiste, ou Traité des Dents (1728). Notable collections include that of Thomas W. Evans, preferred dentist to the court of the French 2nd Empire, and Edward Kirk who served as Dean of the School of Dental Medicine from 1896 to 1917. As for notable characters, the School claims both Doc Holliday and Zane Grey as alums.
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Library at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies
The Judaica collections at the Penn Libraries, as a whole, constitute one of the world's largest and richest resources on the history and culture of Jews. The collections are dispersed, mainly, among five library locations: the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center, the Library at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies Library, the Fisher Fine Arts Library, the University Museum, and the Biddle Law Library. The combined holdings currently total between 350,000-400,000 volumes in 24 languages and dialects and in a range of formats from manuscripts to electronic resources.
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Lippincott Library of the Wharton School
The Lippincott Library's Collection of Historical Annual Reports covers the period 1800 through 1955 for a selection of U.S. companies. The companion web site, Corporate Reports Online, provides these reports in PDF format and is searchable by company or industry name, year, or words in the text.
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Penn Museum Library
With over 145,000 volumes on-site at the Penn Museum, the Museum Library’s collections focus on publications on archaeology throughout the world, biological anthropology, cultural and linguistic anthropology, and medical anthropology, as well as archaeological sciences and cultural heritage management. Included are two special collections: the Daniel Garrison Brinton Collection of Rare Books and Pamphlets and a miscellaneous collection of rare books and facsimiles.
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Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center
Aside from housing several subject specific and special libraries, the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center holds over 1,500,000 works written in European Languages and printed from the late 19th century to the present. The great majority of this material is in the humanities and social sciences, and can be checked out by members of the Penn community. The Van Pelt general collection includes prose, poetry, databases, datasets, videos, graphic novels, comic books, and sound recordings. Within the larger collection are many sub-collections that are notable for their relevance, general interest, or pedagogical and research importance. Such collections include Asian-American film, LGBT comic books and graphic novels, African American speculative fiction, and television news footage from the 60s to the present.
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Veterinary Medicine: Atwood Library & Information Commons
The Fairman Rogers Collection comprises over 1,000 titles, ranging from the sixteenth through the mid-twentieth century. The collection includes medical guides, stud books, and books on breed and breeding, as well as titles dealing with shoeing, harnessing, training, riding, driving, racing, and keeping a proper stable. The complete digitized collection is available thanks to the support of the Laurie Landau Foundation.
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No name: Collection groups and major collections
Africana studies and African American studies special collections
This page provides an overview of Kislak Center collections relating to the fields of Africana studies and African American histories, literatures, and cultures.
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American studies, history, and literature: Modern period
One strength of the Kislak Center's archival holdings is in modern American literary and cultural studies. This page provides an overview of collections focusing on post-Civil War America.
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American studies, history, and literature: North America, colonial era to ca. 1800
Early American collections in the Kislak Center include both manuscripts and printed materials, with notable strengths including literature; travel and exploration narratives; Judaica; and music.
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Arnold and Deanne Kaplan Collection of Early American Judaica
The Kaplan Collection, donated to Penn in November 2012, is considered the most important private collection of its kind. It consists of over 11,000 individual items that document an astonishingly broad range of commercial, social, religious, political, and cultural ties that connected Jews and the general public from the colonial era through the onset of mass migration at the end of the nineteenth century.
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Art and Architecture Collections (Kislak Center)
Collections related to art and architecture held in the Kislak Center.
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Arthur Tress Collection of Japanese Illustrated Books
The Tress Collection is a major collection of Japanese illustrated books and includes over 1,400 titles dating from the late 17th century through the 1930s. The collection covers all genres, including popular illustrated books, such as novels, guidebooks, theater books; deluxe limited-edition poetry, erotica, and artist-centered books; exquisite editions of books on kimono design; and many others.
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Ashley Bryan Archive
Ashley Bryan is a renowned artist, writer, storyteller, children's book creator, and humanitarian. The Ashley Bryan Archive includes correspondence, drawings, artwork, books, and publication materials documenting his long and productive career. The Archive was gifted to the Penn Libraries in 2019.
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Cairo Genizah collections at Penn
The University of Pennsylvania and its Libraries are home to over 650 Cairo Genizah fragments. Penn’s collections, mainly located at the Library at the Katz Center, as well as a collection at the Penn Museum, cover hundreds of years of medieval Mediterranean Jewish and Fatamid history and culture. There are roughly seven distinct subject areas represented in Penn’s collections: Bible, Midrash and Talmud, Liturgy, Secular Poetry, Documents and Letters, Philosophy and Kabbalah, and Miscellaneous items. Among the colletion highlights are the one of the two oldest known fragments of the Passover service, dating from the 11th century CE as well as the one of the longest continuous documents from the Cairo Genizah, a merchant correspondence written in Judeo-Arabic.
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Caroline F. Schimmel Fiction Collection of Women in the American Wilderness
The Caroline F. Schimmel Fiction Collection of Women in the American Wilderness comprises over 6,000 works of fiction by women writers, including novels, short stories, poetry, works by Native American authors, travel writings, narratives of polar expeditions, captivity narratives, and works for children.
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Chef Fritz Blank Culinary Archive and Library
The Chef Fritz Blank Culinary Archive and Library, the collection of a leader of Philadelphia's modern restaurant movement and owner of the restaurant Deux Cheminees, is a major resource for the study of the culinary arts and sciences. It includes several thousand cookbooks and cookery-related books, spanning the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Also in the collection are manuscripts and personal papers; popular ephemera and magazines; menus; community cookbooks; and memorabilia.
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Collection of British and American Fiction, 1660-1830
The University of Pennsylvania Libraries' Collection of British and American Fiction comprises over three thousand works that together form a rich teaching and research collection of early fiction in English, strong in both canonical authors and little-known titles. While drawing from the general Rare Books Collection as well as several smaller named collections, its core is the Singer-Mendenhall Collection, built through the combined efforts of a University of Pennsylvania graduate student and professor in the first half of the twentieth century.
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Contemporary Rare & Special Collections at the Fisher Fine Arts Library
Grounded in architecture, city planning, and historic preservation, the collection has grown through such recent acquisitions as Daido Moriyama’s Farewell Photography (1972), Buckminster Fuller’s Fluid Geography (1946), Jake Chapman’s The Marriage of Reason & Squalor (2009), and several issues of the ephemeral Archigram (1960s).
See collections in this group See more![Engraving of Hurons (detail), from Samuel Champlain, Voyages et decouvertes faites en la nouvelle France... (Paris 1619), opp. p. 87 [Dechert FC6 C3587 619v]](/sites/default/files/styles/medium/public/2020-05/fc6c3587_619v_body0087v%20crop-2.jpeg?h=3480cc27&itok=dg_5h9df)
Dechert Collection
The Robert Dechert Collection includes over 1600 printed books focusing on American travel, exploration, and Native American relations with settlers. Materials date from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. French Americana and the writings of Las Casas are particular strengths of the collection.
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Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate Learning collections
The Dropsie College Collection comprises approximately 180,000 volumes, including twenty Hebrew incunabula and over 8,000 rare printed works in Hebrew, English, German, Yiddish, Arabic, Latin and Ladino. Non-print materials include 451 codices as well as Cairo Genizah fragments and cuneiform tablets.
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Edgar Fahs Smith Memorial Collection
The Edgar Fahs Smith Memorial Collection is devoted to the history of chemistry and collects broadly in that field, emphasizing periods prior to 1900. The collection includes early and modern works on chemistry, alchemy, early medicine and pharmacology, dyeing, metallurgy, mineralogy, and pyrotechnics; biographies of chemists; works on the chemical industry; and the history of chemical education.
See collections in this group See more![Edwin Forrest as King Lear, lithograph [19th c], Furness Theatrical Image Coll. P/Fo600.18 ML](/sites/default/files/styles/medium/public/2018-11/Forrest%20as%20Lear.jpg?h=43e55e9c&itok=heMxbZKn)
Edwin Forrest Library and collection
The Edwin Forrest collection documents the career of Forrest (1806-1872), a major nineteenth-century American actor, noted for his Shakespearean roles. Originally housed in the Edwin Forrest Home in Philadelphia, the Forrest Library includes over three thousand titles dating from the sixteenth through the early twentieth centuries.
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Environmental humanities and sciences special collections
Special collections in the Penn Libraries relevant to the study of the environment and ecology stretch across a broad range of historical time and geographic space. They include medieval and early modern accounts of land and technology; natural history and botany; colonial and settler narratives; modern archives; and imaginative literature.
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Eugene Ormandy Collection
Ormandy served as conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra (1937-1980) and was the beloved architect of the "Philadelphia sound." The Ormandy Collection includes music scores; papers and correspondence; programs; photographs; recordings; oral histories; and audiovisual material.
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Fairman Rogers Collection
The Fairman Rogers Collection includes over 1,000 titles on horses and horsemanship, many from the personal library of Fairman Rogers (1833-1900), dating from the sixteenth through the mid-twentieth century. The collection holds works ranging from medical guides, stud books, and books on breed and breeding, to titles dealing with shoeing, harnessing, training, riding, driving, racing, and keeping a proper stable.
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G. Holmes Perkins Library
Dean G. Holmes Perkins directed the School of Fine Arts (today’s Weitzman School of Design) from 1950 through 1971. Perkins's formidable collection of the monuments of architectural publishing spans 6 centuries, with works by Alberti, Scamozzi, Serlio, Vignola, Taut, Hitchcock, Wright, and Palladio.
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Gotham Book Mart Collection
The Gotham Book Mart was a vital bookstore in the New York literary scene from its creation in 1920 to its closing in 2006. In 2008, after the closure of the bookstore, the Penn Libraries received the remaining stock of books, along with papers and other items from this landmark institution.
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Henry Charles Lea Library
The Lea library collects primary materials for the study of the late medieval and early modern period, focusing on the history of the Catholic Church with a special interest in the institutional, legal, and ecclesiastical bases of Church organization and governance during these periods and, most especially, the Inquisition in Europe and Spanish America. Witchcraft and magic are also subjects that the Lea Library collects extensively.
See collections in this group See more![Image of alembics for distillation, from Axiomes de medicinne [manuscript], Ms. Codex 1660, 50r.](/sites/default/files/styles/medium/public/2020-08/MsColl1660-50r.jpg?h=4c236fb2&itok=byl_LdKu)
History and Sociology of Science special collections
Holdings in this broad field cover many topics and stretch across all time periods. They include printed volumes and archival collections in biomedicine, chemistry, veterinary medicine, engineering, and math, physics, and astronomy. Manuscript collections include works of medieval and Renaissance science; the Edgar Fahs Smith Collection devoted to the history of chemistry, comprising early and modern works on chemistry, alchemy, early medicine and pharmacology, dyeing, metallurgy, mineralogy, and pyrotechnics; biographies of chemists; works on the chemical industry; and the history of chemical education. Other collections relate to science, technology, industry and the history of computing.
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History of Computing
The University of Pennsylvania has an important role in the early history of modern computing. Collections in this field are significant and include early materials from John W. Mauchly as well as contemporary research.
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Holy Land Collections
Penn's libraries' Holy Land collections include primary sources such as rare manuscripts, early modern printed books, travelogues, early photographs and printed postcards, engraved and hand-illustrated maps and atlases, original archeological artifacts, field reports, and extensive circulating secondary sources.
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