What is the history of the Rare Book Department?
The Rare Book Department, among the largest in American public libraries, evolved as the result of generous gifts of individual collections from some prominent Philadelphians. The Library was founded in 1891 and in 1899, P.A.B. Widener presented the library with its first rare collection, 500 incunabula; The Hampton L. Carson Collection on the Growth and Development of the Common Law followed in 1929; The John Frederick Lewis Collections in the 1930s; and the A.S.W. Rosenbach Collection of Early American Children’s Books in 1947. The Rare Book Department emerged as a distinct department in 1949 with the installation of Elkins’s physical library (a 62-foot-long paneled Georgian room from his estate in Whitemarsh, Montgomery County), which included his collections of Americana, Oliver Goldsmith and Charles Dickens.
