Notable Collections

This digital collection contains excavation reports, philological works, and museum catalogs published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and scanned to create .pdf files in 2006-2007.

Early American collections in the Kislak Center include both manuscripts and printed materials, with notable strengths including literature; travel and exploration narratives; Judaica; and music.

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.

The Caroline F. Schimmel Collection of Women in the American Wilderness comprises over 6,000 works by women writers, including novels, short stories, poetry, works by Native American authors, travel writings, narratives of polar expeditions, captivity narratives, and works for children.

This collection contains thousands of comics and graphic novels in multiple languages, with a strength in standalone graphic novels, LGBTQ comics, and published editions of webcomics.

Significant examples of Benjamin Franklin's work as a Philadelphia printer are preserved in the Curtis Collection, donated by the Curtis Publishing Company in 1920 and containing more than 300 titles printed by Franklin and his associates between 1719 and 1786.

The Robert Dechert Collection includes over 1600 printed books focusing on American travel, exploration, and Native American relations with settlers.