The Kaplan Collection documents commercial, social, religious, political, and cultural ties that connected Jews and the general public from the colonial era through the nineteenth century.
This collection of approximately 18,000 items includes books and periodicals on German literature, linguistics, philology, folklore, and related disciplines. Materials date from the 15th through the 19th centuries. The Bechstein Library was acquired by the University of Pennsylvania in 1896.
While the Rare Book & Special Collections at the Fine Arts Library are grounded in architecture, city planning, and historic preservation, it has since grown to reflect new areas of study and research within arts and design disciplines.
The Edgar Fahs Smith Memorial Collection is devoted to the history of chemistry and collects broadly in that field, emphasizing periods prior to 1900. The collection includes early and modern works on chemistry, alchemy, early medicine and pharmacology, dyeing, metallurgy, mineralogy, and pyrotechnics; biographies of chemists; works on the chemical industry; and the history of chemical education.
The Fairman Rogers Collection at the University of Pennsylvania consists of over 1,000 titles, primarily focused on Rogers' interest in horses. It serves as a foundation for scholarly study of the role of the horse in the technical, scientific, and social evolution of nineteenth-century Europe and North America.
This broad collection includes twentieth-century pamphlets and periodicals from across the political spectrum.
The Gotham Book Mart was a vital bookstore in the New York literary scene from its creation in 1920 to its closing in 2006. In 2008, after the closure of the bookstore, the Penn Libraries received the remaining stock of books, along with papers and other items from this landmark institution.
The Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library focuses on Shakespeare’s works, their history and theatrical context, and the long tradition of Shakespearian criticism.
Penn Libraries has a substantive Indo-Caribbean collection that strives to reveal histories, communities, and cultural expressions that have remained underrepresented in most research libraries.