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The special collections library of Brown University, the John Hay Library contains more than 3,000,000 items. Holdings range from Babylonian clay tablets and Egyptian papyri to current-day books, manuscripts, and ephemera. Among the more unexpected items are portraits and paintings by old masters, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s tea set, Napoleon’s death mask, 6,000 toy soldiers, the last daguerrotype taken of Poe, and Whitman’s personal copy of Leaves of Grass. Other notable holdings include the papers and archival materials of Henry David Thoreau, George Orwell, William Blake, and H. G.

Boston College’s Burns Library is home to more than 250,000 volumes, some 16,000,000 manuscripts and important collections of architectural records, maps, art works, newspapers, photographs, films, prints, artifacts and ephemera. Holdings include manuscripts and published works of Samuel T. Coleridge, Graham Greene, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Evelyn Waugh, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Beckett.

The principal repository of rare books and manuscripts at Princeton University, the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections comprises holdings that span five millennia and five continents, and include around 200,000 rare or significant printed works; 30,000 linear feet of textual materials, ranging from cuneiform tablets to contemporary manuscripts; a wealth of prints, drawings, photographs, maps, coins, and other visual materials; the Cotsen Children’s Library; and the Princeton University Archives. Holdings include the papers of J.D. Salinger, F.

The Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library’s extensive manuscript, archival, and rare book collections include the Emory University Archives, African American Collections, literary and poetry collections, along with collections documenting political, cultural, and social movements. The special collections of the Rose Library span the 15th to the 21st centuries—with particular depth in modern literature, African American history, Emory University history, and the history of Georgia and the South.