Columbia University Archives

Columbia University's Rare Book & Manuscript Library is located on the 6th Floor of Columbia University's Butler Library. The library holds the special collections of Columbia University, as well as the Columbia University Archives. The range of the library's holdings spans more than 4,000 years, from cylinder seals created in Mesopotamia to contemporary artists' books. In addition to printed and manuscript resources, the library contains cuneiform tablets, papyri, ostraca, astronomical and mathematical instruments, maps, works of art, photographs, posters, early printing presses and papermaking equipment, type specimens, sound and moving image recordings, theater set models, puppets, masks, ephemera and memorabilia. The Rare Book and Manuscript Library includes unique and rare materials related to all subject areas.

The history of the rare book and manuscript collections dates from the founding of King's College, now Columbia University, in 1754. The library holds materials related to both the first and third presidents of the University, Samuel Johnson and his son William Samuel Johnson, donated by the family in 1914. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the University acquired significant materials though gifts from Stephen Whitney Phoenix, Richard J. H. Gottheil, Brander Matthews, Robert H. Montgomery, David Eugene Smith, and George Plimpton. These gifts included medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, materials related to the history of accountancy, education, and mathematics, and the Dramatic Museum collections. The University’s first major collection purchase was Professor Edwin R. A. Seligman’s library on the history of economics in 1929. This purchase, and the creation of the Friends of the Libraries Group in the late 1920s, was the impetus for growth in the 1930s. The University moved to make provisions for the care of these types of materials, and the Trustees allowed for the establishment of the Rare Book Department on July 1, 1930. By the end of the 1930s, the library was housed on the sixth floor of Butler Library. As the library increased its collecting of archives and manuscripts, the name of the division was changed from the Rare Book Department to the Department of Special Collections in 1946. Its current name was adopted in 1975.

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