Rare Books
The Rare Books Collection is a vital, growing collection that provides research opportunities in many areas of western thought and experience from history to religion and science to art. Like the Manuscript Collections the Rare Books Collection focuses primarily on Virginia history, but includes collections that cover many other areas and interests that span the 15th through the 21st centuries. The Rare Books Collection can be searched through Swem Library's online catalog.
The Rare Books Collection is actually made up of many distinct collections which each focus on a particular subject area or a particular period in the history of the book. These libraries include:
- The general rare books collection which focuses mainly on Virginiana but contains books on historic gardening, military history, early American culture, travel accounts, science and medicine. There are seven beautiful incunabula (books printed before 1501) in the collection.
- There are five family libraries in amongst the Rare Books. These are the Skipwith library, the Tucker - Coleman library, the Jerdone Library, the John Minson Galt library, and the John Millington Library. They all date from the 18th and19th centuries.
- The Francis Nicholson Library is in the process of being acquired by Special Collections. It is our goal to recreate the original library of the College of William and Mary given by the colonial governor before the 1705 fire destroyed all but the single volume we have left. We now have more than 80 of the original 150 titles in the library.
- The Ralph Green collection on printing and the Joseph Hennage collection on printing and the Carol Beinbrink collection on papermaking total more than 1400 volumes on the history of the book as an object and includes our oldest title the Quadragesimale by Johannes Gritsch printed in 1479.
- The Ralph H. Wark Collection of fore-edge paintings. Fore-edge paintings are painted on the edges of the leaves of a book so that they can only be seen when the edges are fanned. Exquisitely rendered paintings like this date almost entirely from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries in England.
- The Chapin-Horowitz collection of cynogetica. This is the second largest collection of books about dogs in this country and continues to grow through its own endowment. It contains scholarly work that dates back to the sixteenth century as well as children's literature, breed guides, and the records of the American Kennel Club.