The Mortimer Rare Book Room was formed by removing fifteenth- and sixteenth-century books from the Neilson stacks in the early 1940s. Thanks to the generosity of alumnae and friends, the collection has grown to nearly 25,000 volumes and has expanded beyond its original role as protector of early printed artifacts. Now sensitive to the range of the college curriculum, the collection covers the history of printing from the fifteenth century to the twentieth. In 1973, a bequest established a fund specifically designated for the purchase of rare books.
The display collection is shelved around the walls in the handsome wood-panelled reading room. Among the incunabula is the Epistole devotissime of St. Catherine of Siena (Venice, Aldus Manutius, 1500), acquired in 1987 as the Smith College Libraries' millionth volume. Author collections of bibliographical distinction are those of J. Ross Browne, Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Geo rge Bernard Shaw, Mary Shelley, Eudora Welty, and Virginia Woolf. While the emphasis of the collection is on printed books, there is a substantial collection of cuneiform tablets, as well as literary and historical manuscripts, including personal and lit erary papers of Newton Arvin, Anna Hempstead Branch, Bliss Carman, and Anne Witten, selected letters of T.J. Cobden-Sanderson, Ellen Glasgow, and Sarah Grand, and letters and poetry of Dorothy L. Sayers.
The Frances Hooper Collection of Virginia Woolf contains both books and manuscripts. A related collection of Bloomsbury iconography also contains graphic images. One case in the reading room is devoted to books and manuscripts from a major collection of Sylvia Plath, poet and a graduate of Smith College. Also on display is a selection of books with jackets designed by George Salter (from the artist's library).
There are substantial collections in botany, the history of science, English economics, early children's literature, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English drama, English political pamphlets published during the reign of Queen Anne (1702-1714), eight eenth-century English literature, the Irish Literary Renaissance, the technique of lithography, British philology and lexicography, nineteenth-century American trade cards, and the history of printing. All phases of the book arts are represented: fine examples of illustrations in original media, private press books, fore-edge paintings, and decorative bindings. Among the press books are books printed by students at Smith College
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