The core of the Penn Libraries’ outstanding linguistics collection is the library of August Friedrich Pott (1802-1887), professor of general and comparative linguistics at the University of Halle and first librarian of the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft.
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.
The Libraries purchases mass market, local and academic cookbooks as they are published, which build on the special collections in Kislak and circulate to support interests both recreational and academic.
The University library has extensive collections of all forms of folk narrative in dozens of languages from all over the world. These collections also exhibit historical depth since the library has been collecting these materials since the turn of the twentieth century.
This collection features artistic works written, directed, produced, or performed by Jews for general as well as for Jewish American audiences. It numbers approximately 2,000 video titles copied on to more than 350 DVD's.
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.
Penn has the most extensive single collection in the world of adventure stories from the late Meiji and Taishō periods.
The Jerry Wasserman Collection of Jewish American Sound Recordings contains 297 sound recordings—mostly LPs—of traditional Jewish and Jewish American humor and music in a variety of folk and popular styles. The collection was donated to the University of Pennsylvania for use in research and teaching.