Modern Books & Manuscripts Collection

Overview

The Modern Books & Manuscripts Collection encompasses materials in all formats dating from 1800 to the present. The department has responsibility for approximately 9.5 million manuscripts and 250,000 rare books and serials, many with important associations, plus substantial numbers of printed ephemera, photographs, drawings, paintings, and objects. While the focus of the collection is on the literature and history of Europe and the Americas, it also includes large holdings of Arabic, Indic, and Syriac manuscripts. (The corresponding printed collections are largely held at Widener Library.) In addition to general strengths in American and European literature and history, there are concentrations in British, French, German, Latin American, Modern Greek, Russian, and Scandinavian literature; the history of missions, particularly those of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions; the Russian Revolution; publishing history; music; and philosophy.

The Modern Books and Manuscripts Department does not hold all post-1800 material in the Houghton collections. The Theodore Roosevelt Collection, George Edward Woodberry Poetry Room (contemporary poetry in English), Printing and Graphic Arts Collection (illustrated books, artist books, and fine press books), and Harvard Theatre Collection all specialize in some aspect of the modern era, and their holdings overlap and intersect with those of the general Modern collection. 

Information concerning the department’s holdings can be found in both HOLLIS (rare books, codex manuscripts, and collection-level descriptions of personal papers and archives) and OASIS (detailed finding aids for all cataloged manuscript and archival collections). Collection materials are consulted in the Houghton Reading Room.

For information on acquiring permission to publish or reproduce collection materials, see Houghton Library Reproductions and Permissions.

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New Acquisitions

For those interested in "what's new," the department produces a browsable list of new acquisitions each year, and maintains a Modern Books and Manuscripts Blog. Most new acquisitions are available for research shortly after receipt; but please check HOLLIS for full information and any access restrictions that may apply.

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American Literature Collections

Houghton Library’s 19th-century American literary collections include the papers of the Alcott family, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Sarah Orne Jewett, Herman Melville, Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr. and Jr.), the James family, William Dean Howells, James Russell Lowell, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Samuel Gridley Howe and Julia Ward Howe, Edward Bellamy, Celia Thaxter, and others. It also includes the archives of Boston publishers Houghton Mifflin Company and Little, Brown.  The library’s printed holdings of all of these authors is also virtually complete and, for many, substantial portions of their libraries are also held. The Bibliography of American Literature (BAL) was based at Houghton to take full advantage of this richness.

The list of 20th-century authors’ papers is also extensive: Henry Adams, Witter Bynner, T.S. Eliot, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Alexander Woollcott, Lafcadio Hearn, Thomas Wolfe, Robert Frost, John P. Marquand, John Dos Passos, John Cheever, John Updike, John Ashbery, E.E. Cummings, Amy Lowell, Gore Vidal, and many others, as well as the records of New Directions Publishing Corp., Houghton Mifflin, Little, Brown, Golden Book Magazine,The Atlantic Monthly, and The Nation.

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British Literature Collections

Please check back for a summary description of Houghton's British literary collections.

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