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Rare books

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The Rare Book Collection covers a wide range of materials, from medieval manuscripts to modern artists’ books. The collection includes the Libraries’ books printed before 1800, books that exist only in very small numbers or that have significant monetary value, collections of particular presses or publishers, and collections that serve teaching or research needs.

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How do you access rare books at Silver Special Collections?

Accordions

Collection highlights

 

The Ovid Collection includes hundreds of the Roman poet’s works printed from 1480 to the twenty-first century, with many illustrated editions of “Metamorphoses.”
Excerpt from a manuscript showing a drawing of a plant with red circular flowers and twisting roots. Text surrounds the plant's root. To the left is a small green monster with wings and talons. The limbs of another monster are visible on the right.

A collection of herbals includes an illustrated manuscript herbal in Italian, produced around 1500, and many important printed herbals from the sixteenth century (and later), including works by Johannes de Cuba, Leonhart Fuchs, Otto Brunfels, Petro Mattioli, Rembert Dodoens, and John Gerarde.

Pictured left, excerpt from a 15th or 16th century Italian Herbal.

Excerpt from a manuscript showing Latin text illustrated with a bird and vegetative details on the right column

Manuscripts include several dozen individual leaves as well as complete codices from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries, on theology, classical literature, and other topics. Early printed books include more than three dozen incunabula (books printed before 1501) and thousands of seventeenth-century imprints. Digital versions of our medieval and renaissance manuscripts are available online in UVM Libraries Digital Collections.

Pictured left, excerpt from a 15th century Book of Hours.

This collection includes notable works by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century explorers and travelers such as Jean de Léry, Joseph François Lafitau, Samuel de Champlain, Francisco López de Gómarra, and André Thevet. Also included are accounts of travelers in the early decades of the United States.
Detail of two shelves from the spring 2024 exhibit, the Sun, the Moon, the Stars, in honor of the April 2024 solar eclipse. The shelves hold poetry and a blue artist's book shaped like an accordion.

The Rare Book Collection provides many resources for the study of historical and contemporary book production, including papermaking, printing, illustration, and binding. British and American fine and private presses are well represented. A large collection of North American and British artists' books include works by Vermont artists and UVM faculty and students.

Pictured left on top shelf: In the event of moon disaster, by Melissa Wagner-Lawler

Marsh was a linguist, diplomat and author of the seminal environmental treatise "Man and Nature." He collected Scandinavian literature, history, nature, and many other topics.
Focusing on selected American, British, and Irish writers of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this category includes a comprehensive collection of books by and about the British poet laureate John Masefield, works by William Butler Yeats and other writers of the Irish literary renaissance, and assorted inscribed first editions.
The proverb library includes more than 8,000 volumes in twenty languages.