The George Kelley Paperback and Pulp Fiction Collection is a collection of over 25,000 pulp magazine and fiction works that is housed in the Special Collections unit, in the University at Buffalo Libraries at State University of New York at Buffalo. Noted as one of the best preserved collections of pulp material in modern times, it was donated to UB Libraries in 1994 by Dr. George Kelley, a professor at Erie Community College in Buffalo, New York.
The collection spans genres from adventure, crime and horror to Westerns, fantasy and science fiction, including books, pulp magazines, fanzines and other literature. According to UB Libraries, there are hundreds of paperbacks from the 1940s, thousands from the 1950s and 1960s and more from the 1970s and 1980s. Many of these are paperback originals which have never appeared in hardcover editions.
Kelley, an alumnus of SUNY at Buffalo, donated the collection to the Lockwood Memorial Library in 1994. Kelley received a doctorate of philosophy from SUNY at Buffalo in 1996, and has received master's degrees from UB in business administration, library science, and English. He is currently a professor of Business Administration at Erie Community College. After being an avid collector of comic books in his youth, Kelley began collecting pulp fiction in his late youth and continued to do so until the 1990s. A majority of his collection was amassed during the 1970s when he would frequent used book stores on his work-related travels across the country. Kelley was keen on preserving his collection throughout the years, storing the works in Ziploc bags.
In addition to Kelley's collection, Dr. Thomas Shaw and his wife, Margarete Shaw, have also contributed a large number of gifts and books to the collection. The Shaw's contribution to the collection is entirely composed of fantasy and science-fiction based works and magazines.