Through a Glass Darkly

Alchemy and the Ripley Scrolls 1400-1700

Piranesi on the Page

Milberg Gallery Exhibition, October 8th, 2021 - December 5th, 2021

Piranesi on the Page tells the story of the book as the centerpiece of Piranesi’s artistic production. What did these volumes mean to him, who did they bring into his world, and how can the process of making them be understood throughout his career? As the central thread that connects all spheres of his enormous ambition, Piranesi’s books reveal how the artist became the foremost printmaker in eighteenth-century Europe.

In Pursuit of the Picturesque

British Color Plate Books 1776-1868 from the collection of Leonard L. Milberg, Class of 1953

Showcasing selected items from the collection of Leonard L. Milberg, In Pursuit of the Picturesque includes nearly 40 large books with colorful, detailed imagery from the British Empire at the turn of the 19th century. The exhibition will open at the Ellen and Leonard Milberg Gallery, located in the Firestone Library lobby, on Jan. 22, 2020.

Gutenberg & After: Europe's First Printers, 1450-1470

Milberg Gallery Exhibition, September 12th, 2019 - December 15th, 2019

Gutenberg’s invention of typography eventually revolutionized the world of text production and distribution. But the printing craft did not produce an immediate explosion. The first two decades of European printing have a pace of their own, and these years contain long overlooked mysteries, which stood in the shadow of such famous monuments as the Gutenberg Bible and the 1457 Mainz Psalter.

Welcome Additions: Selected Acquisitions 2012-2018

Milberg Gallery Exhibition, March 6th, 2019 - June 23rd, 2019

Welcome Additions: Selected Acquisitions 2012-18 is our inaugural exhibition in the new Ellen and Leonard Milberg exhibition gallery. It is a retrospective of recent additions to our special collections within the Cotsen Children’s Library, East Asian Library, Graphic Arts, Manuscripts, Marquand Library of Art and Archaeology, Numismatics, Public Policy Papers, Rare Books, Scheide Library, University Archives, and Western Americana Collection.

Discrimination in Employment - Pamphlet Collection

Step by Step: The March Towards Equal Employment Opportunity

Companion to the exhibition jointly developed by Princeton University Library and the Industrial Relations Section--showcasing efforts made by governments and organizations over the last 80 years.

South Asian Ephemera

The South Asian Ephemera Collection is an openly accessible repository of items from the region of South Asia. It spans a variety of subjects and languages and supports research, teaching, and private study. Newly acquired materials are being digitized and added on an ongoing basis.

Dissidents and Activists in Sri Lanka, 1960s to 1990s

"Dissidents and Activists in Sri Lanka, 1960s to 1990s" is a collection of ephemera curated by the American Institute for Lankan Studies, hosted by PUL, and federated for discovery by the South Asia Open Archives.

Selections from the Graphic Arts Collection

The Graphic Arts Collection holds prints, drawings, photographs, paintings, sculpture, and printed ephemera along with an international book collection specializing in fine press, artists’ books, and illustrated editions.

Manuscript Books

Digitized Handwritten Codices from the Collections of Princeton University Library and Its Collaborators.

Treasures of the Cotsen Collection

The Cotsen Children's Library is a very special library within the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Princeton University Library. Our international research collection of illustrated children's books, manuscripts, original artwork, prints, and educational toys from the 15th century to the present day is the benefaction of Lloyd E. Cotsen '50.

Music and Performing Arts Collections at Princeton

A diverse collection spanning 1,000 years of rare primary and secondary sources together with unique Princeton-based music materials produced in all formats forms this dynamic and expanding section of the Digital Princeton University Library.

Treasures of the East Asian Library

Rare, outstanding, or unique items in East Asian languages, including books, manuscripts, maps, and albums from many eras.

East Asian Library Supplementary Materials

Front and End Matter (Tables of contents, Indexes, etc.) from items in the East Asian Library

Annotated Books

Collected over the years for a variety of reasons, the Library's annotated books today provide evidence not only for historians of reading but also for anyone interested in how and why the mentalité of an era was formed. "Annotated printed books in Firestone Library ... show just how richly rewarding it can be to examine the sparks that texts struck off from early readers. The study of printed books cannot be limited to their printed contents." -- Prof. Anthony Grafton.

Archiving the American West

This exhibition highlights six research projects completed by the students of Archiving the American West (HIS 431), an experimental course first offered at Princeton in Spring 2021. Each student researched an under-catalogued item within Princeton's Collections of the American West and wrote a capstone essay exploring its provenance, historical significance, and further research potential.

Badakhshan Genealogical Document Collection

Transforming rare texts into accessible digital resources

The Badakhshan Manuscript Digitization Project consists of roughly 65 original, privately held genealogical histories (nasab-namahs) from Badakhshan in Tajikistan and Afghanistan dating from the 16th to the 20th centuries. It is the first effort to make available the history of genealogical documentation in the Ismaili community.

The Cairo Geniza Collections

A Princeton Collaboration with the Jewish Theological Seminary

The Geniza Collection represents a substantial portion of some 300,000 items "discovered" in the late 19th century in the Cairo Geniza (a Hebrew word meaning "storeroom") of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in the old city of Cairo (Al-Fusṭāṭ). The Cairo Geniza fragments — which span more than a millennium — were consigned to the storeroom because damaged or worn-out religious texts and unneeded old documents could not be thrown away if they contained the name of God."

Capturing Feathers

An Imaging Journal of Digitized Collections

"Capturing Feathers" is an online exhibition, focusing on bird imagery found throughout the Digital Repository at Princeton University Library. Created by the Digital Imaging Studio Team at Princeton University Library and inspired by the recently digitized personal journals of ornithologist Charles H. Rogers (1888-1977).

Colección Archivo Fotográfico de la Protesta en Chile 2019

These photographs document the multiple forms of visual resistance that emerged during the early months of protest (roughly from October to December 2019), from graffiti to larger-scale interventions, many of which were subsequently modified or destroyed.

Early Arabic Printed Works

A 2019 digital initiative, supplementing the digital Islamic Manuscripts collection that scholars can already access in DPUL.

Einstein & Princeton: University to Universe

A Curated Collection that highlights Albert Einstein's relationships with the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University, and the Princeton University Press.

Engineering in the Modern World

Beginning with the industrial revolution in Great Britain, engineering objects and systems have shaped our modern world. The works included in this collection support the teaching and research conducted by students enrolled in the course Engineering in the Modern World.

Guatemala News & Information Bureau Archive 1963-2000

The Guatemala News and Information Bureau (GNIB) was an activist and solidarity group based in San Francisco, California, created in 1978 to support and inform the public about Guatemalan movements for peace and justice, indigenous rights, and labor rights.

Hellenica

Princeton University owns one of the world’s largest library collections devoted to Hellenic Studies, with particular strengths in Byzantine and post-Byzantine manuscripts, early-modern Greek printing, the Greek Enlightenment, Philhellenism and Modern Greek literature and poetry.

Historical Photograph Collection

Grounds and Buildings Series

The Grounds and Buildings Series of the Historical Photograph Collection contains photographs of the grounds and buildings owned by Princeton University. The photographs date from the late 1850s to the present, with the bulk of the photographs dating from the 1870s to the 1940s.

Ho! For the Open Country

The Promise of the Public Park

Featuring a small subset of Princeton University Library items related to the rise of public parks, gardens and picnics in 19th century America, this collection aims to celebrate the utopian promise of the urban parks movement and encourages viewers to consider what more can be done to meet that promise.

Indignados/15M Movement Collection from Spain

This collection contains digital images of protest signs created in various cities across Spain during the Indignados/15M protest movement of 2011.

Khenpo Sodargye Lecture Records

Since 2010, Khenpo Sodargye has been invited to give talks at more than 100 universities in Asia, Europe, Oceania, North America and Africa, including most top universities of the world, such as Harvard University, Yale University, Columbia University, Stanford University, Princeton University, Sydney University, and the University of Göttingen.

Manuscripts of the Islamic World

المكتبة البرينستونية الالكترونية للمخطوطات الاسلامية

A curated selection of extraordinary manuscripts hosted or held by Princeton University Library.

Nietzsche Collection

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is generally considered one of Germany’s greatest writers and philosophers. His controversial philosophical works provide a revolutionary challenge to Christianity and traditional morality.

Performance Audio Archive Collection

Online audio archive of Princeton University's Performance ensembles, Faculty, Graduate and Class recitals.

Princeton Collections of the American West

The Princeton Collections of the American West began in 1947 with the gift of printed materials and manuscripts focused on overland narratives, the cattle trade, and the Rocky Mountain West collected by Philip Ashton Rollins, Class of 1889. Over the course of six decades, the collection expanded to include indigenous languages and the history of the American Indian, the Spanish Southwest, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), territorial imprints, and photography of the American West.

Princeton Papyri Collections

Most of the Library's papyri are in the Manuscripts Division, chiefly Greek documents from Ptolemaic, Roman, and Byzantine Egypt (Oxyrhynchus and the Fayum towns). There are also Greek literary, sub-literary, and Scriptural fragments, and examples in Hieroglyphic, Hieratic, Demotic, Coptic, Latin, and Arabic.

Princeton Slavic Collections

Selections from Princeton’s collections of rare documents of the artistic, intellectual, social and political history of Russia, Eastern Europe and the territories of the Former Soviet Union.

Princeton University Historical Postcard Collection

circa 1890 - 1960

The Historical Postcard Collection contains postcards that range from 1900 to the 1960s, documenting the buildings and environs of the Princeton University campus. The collection features both monochrome and color postcards, unmarked and canceled postcards from various postcard makers and publishers.

Printed Books

Digitized Rare Printed Books from Princeton University Library and Its Collaborators

Rose Early, Grass Scarce

Writing the Journey into the Nineteenth Century American West

Beginning in the 1840s, hundreds of thousands of people headed West from the United States into its territories and beyond. Many left behind detailed journals and wrote long letters to friends and family back home. Rose Early, Grass Scarce introduces some of these westering characters and highlights the curatorial and transcription work done by Princeton librarians, faculty, and graduate students.

Russian Opera Libretti

1859–1916

A growing digital collection featuring Bizet, Delibes, Donizetti, Gounod, Mascagni, Massenet, Meyerbeer, Mozart, Rimsky-Korsakov, Rossini, Rubinstein, Saint-Saëns, Serov, Tchaikovsky, Verdi, and Weber, plus premieres of works by Davidov, Flotow, Mussorgsky, and Nápravnik.

Selections from the Near East Collections

Selections from Princeton’s collections of rare documents of the artistic, intellectual, social and political history of the Near East.

Shakespeare and Company Project: Sources

Sylvia Beach Papers at Princeton University Library

This collection includes Shakespeare and Company Project sources not available on the Project website.