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At its founding the Chapin Library concentrated on broad areas of books and knowledge: Incunabula, Americana, English Literature, Continental (European) Literature, Bibles and Liturgical Works, and Science, together with essential reference books. Since then the Library has grown by gift and purchase, and has extended into other subjects, in support of the liberal arts curriculum of Williams College. Most of the Library's holdings are cataloged in FRANCIS, but not all of the individual items mentioned on this page are always on display. Incunabula (15th-Century Printed Books) The Chapin Library contains more than 525 works printed during the 15th century, including the first editions of esteemed classical writers and many of the earliest books printed in Europe. Some of these works are not owned by any other American library, and others are relatively scarce, there being but one or two copies reported in American collections. Nearly one hundred of the Library's incunabula are preserved in contemporary bindings. Return to top In this valuable collection are some one hundred items from the press of Aldus Manutius, the great Venetian printer and publisher, and his heirs, from the period 1495 to 1595. Among the landmarks are the Virgil (1501), the first book set throughout in italic type; the Aristotle Opera (Greek, 1495-98); and the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), the quintessential book of the Italian Renaissance. Return to top The Library's rich Americana holdings document the origins, development, and history of the Western Hemisphere, particularly the United States, beginning with two editions (Rome, 1493 and Basel, 1494) of Christopher Columbus's letter to the Spanish court announcing his discovery of the New World. The collection is especially strong in the period of the early voyages and discoveries and in the American colonial, revolutionary, and constitutional eras, but extends to the present day and contains many notable works. Among these are growing bodies of literature in Black and African-American history and in women's studies, and a substantial collection of works by and about Daniel Webster (1782-1852). The founding documents of the United States - original printings of the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights - together with George Washington's copy of The Federalist (1788), with his signature and bookplate - are on permanent display in the Library. An associated collection, of material by and about Theodore Roosevelt [Word document] honors one of Mr. Chapin's friends and political colleagues. The Chapin Library also contains numerous related American manuscripts and historical prints, and the Robert P. Fordyce, Class of 1956 collection of some 10,000 stereo views (stereoscopic prints), mostly of American subjects. Return to top This extensive collection ranges from the 16th century to the present and includes first and other significant editions by authors from Geoffrey Chaucer to Virginia Woolf. Among these are all four Shakespeare folios (and a variant printing of the Third); much else by poets and playwrights of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods; and significant holdings of Austen, Byron, Coleridge, Defoe, Dickens, Dryden, George Eliot, Fielding, Goldsmith, Dr. Johnson, Keats, Milton, William Morris, Scott, Shelley, Thackeray, and Trollope. Several authors are represented by special collections formed mostly by alumni and friends: Samuel "Erewhon" Butler, Rupert Brooke, Sir Winston S. Churchill [Word document], Joseph Conrad, R.B. Cunninghame-Graham, T.S. Eliot, James Elroy Flecker, and Rudyard Kipling. Also in the Library is a collection of English broadside ballads. Return to top Continental (European) Literature and Classics The Library's collection of continental literature, language, and culture is divided into six parts: French, German, Italian, Spanish, Greek, and Latin. It comprises major works by authors such as Corneille, Montaigne, Dante, Boccaccio, Cervantes, Goethe, and Luther, in addition to numerous titles by Classical authors. The Library is particularly proud of its holdings of Greek and Latin classics, among them fine productions of the Aldine press; the first printed editions of Aesop, Aristophanes, and Homer, inter alia; the first classical text printed in England (Aristotle, Ethica ad Nicomachum, Oxford, 1479); and the first classical text printed anywhere (Cicero, De Oratore, Subiaco, Italy, before 30 September 1465). Allied with these are a selection of Greek manuscript fragments on papyri from Oxyrhynchus, and fine 15th-century humanistic manuscripts of Ovid and Vergil. Return to top This distinguished collection begins in the 18th century with authors such as Anne Bradstreet and Timothy Dwight, through the works of Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier et al. in the 19th century, and continues with 20th-century writers such as Ernest Hemingway and James Michener. Especially noteworthy holdings include works by George Ade, Gelett Burgess, Stephen Crane, William Faulkner, Oliver Herford, Sinclair Lewis, Edwin Arlington Robinson, William Saroyan, Booth Tarkington, Carolyn Wells, and Walt Whitman. The Library also holds, by deposit of the Trustees of Reservations, an important collection of manuscripts, drawings, documents, and photographs devoted to William Cullen Bryant and his family. Return to top In addition to the printed texts of many of the world's great Bibles, the Library has a few manuscript versions, the most important of which are the Tours Gospels, circa 800 A.D., written in the scriptorium of Charlemagne; and a Greek New Testament, Codex Theodori, dated 1295. Also here are a selection of manuscript and printed books of hours, psalters, and prayer books. Among the Library's rarest printed Bibles are Fust & Schoeffer's New Testament (1462), the Geneva Bible (1560), the Bishop's Bible (1568), the first edition of the King James Version (1611), a fine copy of Eliot's Indian Bible (Cambridge, Mass., 1661, 1663), Baskerville's Bible (1763), the first American Hebrew Bible (1814), and early vernacular editions ranging from Anglo-Saxon to Syriac. Return to top The Chapin Library's History of Science collection includes such diverse items as Agricola's De Re Metallica (1561), Audubon's Viviparous Quadrupeds (1845-54), Catesby's Natural History (1731-43), De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium by Copernicus (1543), Darwin's Origin of Species (1859), Einstein's contributions to Annalen der Physick (1905), editions of Euclid beginning with the first (1482), Fulton's Canal Navigation (1796), the scarce first edition of Harvey's De Motu Cordis (1628), Hooke's Micrographia (1667), Newton's Opticks (1704), White's Natural History of Selborne (1798), and a special mimeographed copy of the Smyth Report on the atomic bomb (1945). Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry, Geology, Mathematics, Natural History, and Physics are all represented. Of particular interest are holdings of herbals and illustrated botanical works from 1484 and later, and more than two hundred volumes devoted to ornithology, including the double elephant folio edition of Audubon's Birds of America (1827-38) and forty-two volumes of the works of John Gould. The Library's Sporting and Outdoors Books collection also has applications to Science, especially Environmental Studies. Return to top Besides a wide array of illuminated and decorated manuscripts and books, hundreds of illustrated books, books with inserted prints, contemporary artist's books, rare books about art, architecture, and crafts, and a small number of manuscripts by or relating to artists, the Chapin Library contains numerous separate prints, posters, paintings, drawings, photographs, and ephemera. These separate materials are contained primarily in the Library's Graphic Arts and Performing Arts collections, or are adjuncts to literary and historical collections. The Samuel "Erewhon" Butler Collection, for example, includes artworks by Butler, a skilled amateur painter, and his photographs of the sculpture at Varallo in northern Italy. Archives of the American poster artist and illustrator C.B. Falls and the Dutch-American architect and artist Herman Rosse are also in the Chapin Library, and include a variety of paintings, drawings, and fabric designs, as well as working books and papers. Return to top The Chapin Library collections altogether contain many of the landmarks of the history of printing, from a leaf from the Gutenberg Bible to works by the great typographers and book designers of the present day. In the latter category, the Library holds thousands of books, broadsides, and pieces of ephemera produced by both major and minor private presses and fine printers, largely from Great Britain and the United States. These include work by the Allen, Ashendene, Cummington, Daniel, Doves, Elston, Gehenna, Golden Cockerel, Grabhorn, Kelmscott, Nonesuch, Overbrook, Rampant Lions, Stinehour, and Whittington presses, among many others, by typographers such as Will Bradley, Theodore L. DeVinne, F.W. Goudy, Bruce Rogers, and D.B. Updike, and by publishers such as the Imprint Society and the Limited Editions Club. In recent years the Chapin Library has acquired as well a number of important artist's books, notably titles by the Kaldewey Press and by the Welsh printmaker and poet Shirley Jones. Here also are fine collections of the work of W.A. Dwiggins, C.B. Falls, and Herman Rosse, and a sampling of calligraphy and engraved letter designs, in particular an archive of work by the British engraver Leo Wyatt and three engraved slate tablets by David Kindersley and his workshop. Return to top The Performing Arts collection of the Chapin Library includes numerous books, broadsides, posters, photographs, and programs from the fields of theater, film, music, dance, and puppetry. Associated materials are found also in the Library's Herman Rosse archive, which contains hundreds of paintings, drawings, and set and costume designs made by Mr. Rosse for the stage and cinema, as well as his Academy Award for Art Direction for King of Jazz (1930) and his prototype design for the Tony Award; and in an archive of the writer, filmmaker, and Williams alumnus John Sayles '72, which includes scripts, working videos, and documentation. Return to top The Library's collection of children's books ranges from editions of Aesop and Comenius in the late 17th century to works by contemporary author-illustrators such as C.B. Falls, Maurice Sendak, and Dr. Seuss. Among its highlights are the first English edition (1823-66) of the Grimms' Popular Stories, illustrated by George Cruikshank, first editions of Lewis Carroll's Alice books (1866, 1872), original printings of Randolph Caldecott's picture books (1878-85), and almanacs (1883-97) illustrated by Kate Greenaway. Return to top Although not a discrete section of the Chapin Library, Women's Studies materials are actively acquired for our history, literature, and science collections, and are specially indexed within the Library by date and language. Return to top The Library contains approximately five hundred American cookbooks, mainly from the 19th century, the gift of Mrs. Eleanor T. Fordyce. These are useful not only for their recipes, but also as windows into American culture at a time long past. Return to top Magic, Witchcraft, Alchemy, and the Occult A finding aid to Chapin Library holdings in these subjects may be found here. This category is intended to encompass all aspects of sport and the outdoors. The collection was begun with gifts of fishing books by Robert A. DeVilbiss, Class of 1933, and J. Brooks Hoffman, M.D., Class of 1940, and by the bequest of Francis S. Woods. It also includes several works from Mr. Chapin's original gift in founding the Library, notably the first five editions of Izaak Walton's Compleat Angler. In December 2000 the Library received 95 additional angling books and 110 hunting books, including several classics of early 19th-century color-plate field sports literature, given by Mr. and Mrs. Robert C. Neff, from the collection of his uncle, Robert Carey, Jr., Class of 1920. Return to top In addition to the Oxyrhynchus papyri noted above, the Chapin Library holds a small but choice collection of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, beginning with a version of the Gospels in Latin, written out in one of Charlemagne's scriptoria in Tours, France around the year 800. Succeeding centuries are each represented by at least one manuscript codex (book), and the 15th century by humanistic manuscripts (Dante, Ovid, Virgil) and several books of hours. More modern manuscripts in the Chapin Library include letters by Presidents of the United States from George Washington to George Bush; papers of American statesman Hamilton Fish, of the reformers Samuel Gridley Howe and Julia Ward Howe, of David Dudley Field and his family of Haddam, Connecticut and Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and of the missionary to Persia James Lyman Merrick; and letters and literary manuscripts by authors such as Samuel "Erewhon" Butler, Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Edna Ferber, William Faulkner, John Galsworthy, George Barr McCutcheon, Edgar Lee Masters, W. Somerset Maugham, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and William Saroyan. Return to top Thousands of volumes
are at hand in the Chapin Library to help locate and interpret rare books
and manuscripts. These include bibliographies, critical and historical
works, and periodicals. Return to top
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This page was last updated on 10 September 2005 |