Skip to main content

Distributed for Brandeis University Press

Honoring the History of the Brandeis Library

An Insight into Brandeis’ Special Collections

The Brandeis University Library’s Archives and Special Collections is a rich and varied set of rare books and unique manuscripts that spans several centuries—yet as a collection they have a comparatively short history. The foundations of the Special Collections, like the foundations of Brandeis University itself in 1948, were built by people who believed in the mission of Brandeis to welcome faculty and students from all backgrounds and who wanted to see the new enterprise succeed and flourish. The Brandeis Library now holds thousands of rare books and tens of thousands of linear feet of manuscript collections—the manuscript boxes laid end-to-end would stretch further than the length of the Boston Marathon.

This special-edition book features sixty of these rare books and manuscripts from the library’s Special Collections. Full-color images accompany descriptions written by Brandeis faculty, graduate students, librarians, and scholars. The featured items include rare books, artistic works, photographs, manuscript collections, Judaica materials, historically significant archival collections, and more. Honoring the History of the Brandeis Library is an illuminating look at Brandeis’s unique and invaluable rare text collection. 


176 pages | 151 color plates | 7 x 10

History:


Brandeis University Press image

View all books from Brandeis University Press

Table of Contents

Foreword by Beth Bernstein, Preface by Matthew Sheehy, Acknowledgments, Introduction by Sarah Shoemaker, Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologica; A Few Illuminated Medieval Manuscripts at Brandeis; The First Bookplate; Nuremberg Chronicle (Liber Chronicarum); The Walter F. and Alice, Gorham Collection of Early Music Imprints; Geneva Bible. London: Deputies of Christopher Barker, Printer to the Queenes most excellent Majestie, 1589; Perry Miller Collection on the Colonial Religious Experience in America; Bern Dibner Collection in the History of Science; McKew Parr Collection: Magellan and the Age of Discovery; Dante’s Divine Comedy, censored by Spanish Inquisition; Shakespeare collection; Three Books of Renaissance Cryptography and the Secret of Shakespearean Authorship; Judaica materials in Special Collections; L’Encyclopédie; More than Just a John Hancock: The Signers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution Collections; Jack J. and Therese G. Katz collection of Chinese snuff bottles; Bernice and Henry Tumen collection; Burmese Palm Leaf Manuscripts; Fore-edge paintings; Walter E. Fernald Developmental Center’s Samuel Gridley Howe Library collections; Trustman Collection of Honoré Daumier Lithographs; Michael Lally Civil War letters, 1861-1865; Diary (1859-1886) of William Ayrton; Paris Commune posters; Buffalo Bill Dime Novels; Louis Dembitz Brandeis collection; The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye and the Kelmscott Press; Consistoire Central Israélite de France collection; Léon Lipschutz collection of Dreyfusiana and French Judaica; Native American watercolors; Pauline Trigère papers; Leo Frank Trial Collection, 1909-1961; Nahum Goldmann collection, 1910-2004; Marcel Proust letters; Diary of a World War I Aid Worker; Colonel Edward H. McCrahon Family Collection of World War I Posters; World War I and World War II Propaganda Posters Collection; Sacco and Vanzetti collections; Spanish Civil War periodical collection, 1923-2009; Spanish Civil War Poster Collection; Lewis S. Feuer Papers; Hugo Oehler collection; Carl Van Vechten photographs, 1932-1964; Victor Young Collection; Le TemoinSpitzer family papers; Theresienstadt concentration camp documents, 1939-1945; Eric M. Lipman collection of Nazi documents; Jewish Resistance Collection; World War II Guernsey scrapbook; Hall-Hoag Collection of Extremist Literature in the United States; The Lenny Bruce Collection; Leo Rosten papers; Arthur Laurents collection; Joseph Heller Catch-22 manuscript and correspondence; Sophie Tucker scrapbooks; Radical Pamphlet Collection; Havurat Shalom records; Marcia Freedman papers.

Be the first to know

Get the latest updates on new releases, special offers, and media highlights when you subscribe to our email lists!

Sign up here for updates about the Press