William L. Clements Library

The William L. Clements Library is a rare book and manuscript repository located on the University of Michigan’s central campus in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Specializing in Americana and paricularly North American history prior to the twentieth century, the holdings of the Clements Library are grouped into four categories: Books, Manuscripts, Graphics and Maps. The library’s collection of primary source materials is expansive and particularly rich in the areas of social history, the American Revolution, and the colonization of North America. The Book collection includes 80,000 rare books, pamphlets, broadsides, and periodicals. Within the other divisions, the library holds 600 atlases, approximately 30,000 maps, 99,400 prints and photographs, 134 culinary periodicals, 20,000 pieces of ephemera, 2,600 manuscript collections, 150 pieces of artwork, 100 pieces of realia, and 15,000 pieces of sheet music.

The Clements Library is visited by over 450 researchers yearly. Patrons include undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty, and scholars from around the world, such as Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian, David McCullough, who used the library’s collections for the book 1776.

William L. Clements, an alumnus and regent of the University of Michigan, founded the library in 1923. The library's initial collections were donated by Clements, an avid collector of materials relating to the discovery of the Americas by Europeans and the American Revolution. Clements’ extensive personal collection included "20,000 volumes of rare books, 2,000 volumes of early newspapers, several hundred maps, and the papers of William Petty, 2nd Earl of Shelburne." Upon the opening of the library, Clements published the book, The William L. Clements Library of Americana at the University of Michigan, detailing the acquisition of his personal collection. The book and the Clements Library were reviewed by Lawrence C. Wroth in the New York Times on July 22, 1923. Wroth vigorously praised Clements, saying, “The Clements Library goes to the University of Michigan [as a collection] in which no inquiry concerning America between 1492 and 1800 need go unanswered.”

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