Rare Books and Manuscripts Collections

As one of the country’s preeminent women’s colleges for nearly a century and a half, Bryn Mawr has built extensive collections on women writers, artists, and activists, as well as collections that document women’s daily lives.  Included are the papers of prominent women associated with Bryn Mawr, including M. Carey Thomas, Bryn Mawr’s second president and a leading women's rights advocate; pamphlets, newspapers, and ephemera from the suffrage campaigns in the United States and internationally; and strong collections of the published writings of Renaissance Italian women poets, 18th century French women novelists, works on domestic life and cookery.  

Bryn Mawr holds one of the country’s largest collections of books printed in Europe during the half-century between the invention of printing and 1500.  Included are important early printings of classical and patristic texts, works by Renaissance humanists, and illustrated works, notably the Nuremberg Chronicle and the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.   Most of the works are in Latin, but the collection also includes some of the earliest printings of Ancient Greek, as well as works in French, German and Italian.

An enormous collection of 19th and 20th-century works for young readers was bequeathed to the College by Ellery Yale Wood (Class of 1952). They number over 17,000 volumes. More information can be found on the Special Collections Blog.

The Library’s collections of illustrated books date from the 15th century to the present, and include large numbers of books on natural history, travel, classical antiquities, and daily life.  The natural history books include William Hamilton’s 1776 Campi Phlegraei on the eruptions of Mt. Vesuvius, and many of the most significant works in botany and ornithology, including books by Leonhardt Fuchs, Pierre-Joseph Redouté, Edward Lear, and John Gould.   The collections on classical antiquity include Stuart & Revett’s 1762 Antiquities of Athens;  Robert Wood’s books from the 1750s on the ruins at Palmyra and Balbec, and the massive Description de l’Égypte (1809-1828).  The Library also has a collection of 70 emblem books, a popular form of literature in Europe from the 16th to the early 18th centuries that combined allegorical illustrations with texts on morality and religion.  For further information about the collections, see the library’s guides to Botanical Works and Emblem Books, and the online exhibitions Luxuriant Nature Smiling Round, Mapping New Worlds, and The Invention of Antiquity.     

The library has an extensive collection of printed European and American accounts of travel to the rest of the world, beginning with Breydenbach’s 1486 illustrated book on his trip to Jerusalem, and including large numbers of works on the Americas, Africa, and Asia from the 16th century to the early 20th century.  In addition to printed books, there are numerous unpublished letters and diaries describing the writers’ experiences in other countries, including letters of Bryn Mawr graduates Clara Edwards letters from Persia during World War I, and Margaret Bailey Speer’s letters as dean at Yenching University in China during the 1920s and 1930s. 

Manuscript collections include large collections of papers of British writers Ralph Hodgson, A.E. Housman, Laurence Housman, and Christina Rossetti; American poet and Bryn Mawr graduate Marianne Moore; long-time New Yorker fiction editor Katherine Sargent White; and Theatre Guild producer Theresa Helburn; artist Anne Truitt; and British illustrator and stage designer Claude Lovat Fraser.  The book collections are especially strong in poetry and novels by women writers, including Italian women writers from the 16th & 17th centuries, French women writers from the 18th century, and British and American women writers from the 18th to the 20th centuries.  Other highlights include the Shakespeare First Folio, a large collection of Kelmscott Press books, and 20th century Latin American literature.