What's Cool in The Rare Book & Manuscript Library?

CALENDAR OF EVENTS

Feb. 6 & 7: Author & Artist Audrey Niffenegger! More...
Feb. 14: Coambs & Bregman Concert! More...
Feb. 15: Lex Tate Lecture! More...
Feb. 27: Brass Band Exotica Concert! More...
March 2 & 3: Author Gary Blackwood! More...
March 4: Drama Collections: The Play's the Thing! More...
The Rare Book & Manuscript Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is the principal repository for early manuscripts and rare books, and for literary manuscripts in the broad fields of language, literature, history, art, theology, economics, technology, and the natural sciences.

Established in 1936 from Professor Harris Fletcher’s John Milton collection and Professor Thomas Baldwin’ss Shakespeare collection, The Rare Book & Manuscript Library has grown to over 300,000 books and more than 7,130 linear feet of manuscripts.

Particular collection strengths are found in early printing and the Elizabethan and Stuart periods in England, works by Shakespeare, various important editions of the Bible, and renaissance school books. The Library is renowned for its outstanding collections of incunabula and emblem books. Also noteworthy are the collections of Spanish Civil War material, American wit and humor, and Italian, Spanish, Latin, and English drama. Among the literary manuscripts housed here are papers of such notable figures as Carl Sandburg, H.G. Wells, William Maxwell, W.S. Merwin, Anthony Trollope, William Allingham, Marcel Proust, Grant Richards, Richard Bentley, and John Richardson.

A way cool project underway in RBML: “Project Unica”, digitization of books known to exist only in our collections: http://illinoisharvest.grainger.uiuc.edu/collections.asp#jumpU

For more information, please visit The Rare Book & Manuscript Library Home Page at: http://www.library.uiuc.edu/rbx
From the 'First Folio' of William Shakespeare. Shakespeare's fellow actors and shareholders at the Globe, John Heminges and Henry Condell, published the work in 1623 after their friend's death (in 1616). There are 36 plays in the collection, 18 of which are published here for the first time. In a prefatory letter entitled “To the great Variety of Readers” Heminges and Condell express deep admiration and friendship for Shakespeare and explain that they are publishing the plays in their best and "original" form. Their repeated advice holds true today: READ him and you will know why we value our Will so highly.

Click on the image to link to the catalog record for the First Folio.
The first Bible printed in America was not an English Bible, nor was it a scholarly Greek, Hebrew, or Latin Bible.  It is this 1661/63 Bible in Natick (also known as Wampanoag), the language of Algonquian people of the present-day state of Massachusetts. It is also the first Bible printed anywhere in the Western Hemisphere.

Click on the image to link to this title's catalog record.
One of the coolest collections in The Rare Book & Manuscript Library are the papers of H.G. Wells. The collection consists of more than 162 manuscripts and proofs, more than 70,000 letters to and from Wells, nearly 1000 photographs, and such realia as his passports, bank statements, and locks of his second wife Jane's hair.

At left is the first page of the manuscript draft of Well's frightfully cool novel, War of the Worlds.

To link to the finding aid for the Wells correspondence, please click on the image.