Caroline Schimmel is one of the last graduates of the former Columbia University Library School. She is an elected member of the Grolier Club, the Royal Geographical Society, and the Explorers Club. She is a full-time book collector and bibliographer. Her passion for her subject, inspired in the late 1960s by the women’s movement, and her training as a rare book librarian, have contributed to the development of her remarkable collection. In addition to the fiction Ms. Schimmel has donated to Penn, she has collected roughly fifteen thousand non-fiction works that document female accounts of settling the west, exploration and science in the wilderness, local histories, cookery, and Native American women. Ms. Schimmel remains an active collector and intends to continue adding to the Penn collection.
