The Mortimer Rare Book Collection (MRBC) is the rare books collection of

Smith College Smith College is a Private university, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts Women's colleges in the United States, women's college in Northampton, Massachusetts, United States. It was chartered in 1871 by Sophia Smit ...

. Along with the

Sophia Smith Collection The Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College is an internationally recognized repository of manuscripts, photographs, periodicals and other primary sources in women's history. General One of the largest recognized repositories of manuscripts, a ...

and

Smith College Archives Smith College is a private, independent women's liberal arts college with coed graduate and certificate programs, located in Northampton, Massachusetts, United States. The Smith College Archives document the life of the College by collecting mate ...

, it makes up Smith College Special Collections. The collection supports both general research and the curriculum of Smith College classes.

History

Smith created its first Rare Book Room in the 1937 addition to Neilson Library, under the direction of Smith librarian Mary E. Dunham. It was renamed the Mortimer Rare Book Room in 1994 in honor of curator and teacher Ruth Mortimer, who herself graduated from Smith, and served as the collection's steward from 1975 until her death in 1994. It was under Mortimer's leadership that the collection developed its

Sylvia Plath Sylvia Plath (; October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet and author. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for '' The Colossus and Other Poems'' (1960), '' Ariel'' (1965), a ...

and

Virginia Woolf Adeline Virginia Woolf (; ; 25 January 1882 28 March 1941) was an English writer and one of the most influential 20th-century modernist authors. She helped to pioneer the use of stream of consciousness narration as a literary device. Vir ...

collections. The repository was renamed the Mortimer Rare Book Collection when it became a part of Smith College Special Collections, a then-newly formed entity at Smith.

Collections

The MRBC has extensive holdings of both printed books and literary manuscripts, including

cuneiform Cuneiform is a Logogram, logo-Syllabary, syllabic writing system that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Near East. The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era. Cuneiform script ...

tables, European and American

herbal A herbal is a book containing the names and descriptions of plants, usually with information on their medicinal, Herbal tonic, tonic, culinary, toxic, hallucinatory, aromatic, or Magic (paranormal), magical powers, and the legends associated wi ...

s, modernist literature,

artist's book Artists' books (or book arts or book objects) are works of art that engage with and transform the form of a book. Some are mass-produced with multiple editions, some are published in small editions, while others are produced as one-of-a-kind o ...

s, and book historical artifacts and examples. Among the Collection’s eighty

incunable An incunable or incunabulum (: incunables or incunabula, respectively) is a book, pamphlet, or broadside that was printed in the earliest stages of printing in Europe, up to the year 1500. The specific date is essentially arbitrary, but the ...

s (books printed before 1501) is the ''Epistole devotissime'' of St. Catherine of Siena (Venice: Aldus Manutius, 1500), acquired in 1987 as Smith College Libraries' millionth volume. Collection highlights include: *

br>collection
(and related collections, as well as a small selection of Plath realia) * Ann M. Martinbr>papers

Papers
of

George Salter George Salter (5 October 1897 – 31 October 1967), born Georg Salter, was an originally German, and from 1940 onwards an American book cover designer. He revolutionized cover design for books. He claimed worldwide fame for his design for Alfred ...

br>papers
*

Leonard Baskin Leonard Baskin (August 15, 1922 – June 3, 2000) was an American sculptor, draughtsman and graphic artist, as well as founder of the Gehenna Press (1942–2000). One of America's first fine arts presses, it went on to become "one of the most imp ...

br>broadsides and printsSally Taft Duplaix Collection
(mainly comprising 20th century lesbian pulp fiction)

References

External links

Mortimer Rare Book Collection
website
Archival collections in the Mortimer Rare Book Collection
{{Smith College University and college academic libraries in Massachusetts Rare book libraries in the United States Special collections libraries in the United States Smith College 1937 establishments in Massachusetts Literary archives in the United States Libraries in Hampshire County, Massachusetts Library buildings completed in 1937