About the Rare Books Collections

Totalling more than 100,000 volumes, Dartmouth's rare book collections constitute a resource of major importance to the institution and the scholarly world at large.

Principal concentrations include nineteenth- and twentieth- century British and American literature, printing and the book arts, the literature of the White Mountains, and New Hampshire imprints. Comprehensive collections of particular authors include the works of Rupert Brooke, Erskine Caldwell, Richard Eberhart, Robert Frost, T.E. Lawrence, E.V.Lucas, H.L. Mencken, Kenneth Roberts, and Edward Thomas.

A popular feature is Daniel Webster's copy of the double elephant folio first edition of John James Audubon's Birds Of America, housed in a special case in the Reading Room.

American and British Theatre is the cornerstone of the Williams/Watson Theatre Collection, a consolidation of campus wide resources that comprises over eight thousand published plays, over twenty thousand playbills, and many thousand photographs, clippings, and ephemera.

• Rare Books Collections
• Donating Books to Special Collections