PH. Rare Books and Print History

Artists’ books are works of art in the form of a book. This collection consists of 67 artists’ books created between 1976 and 2012. It includes works by famous artists like Chuck Close and Ed Ruscha as well as young emerging artists during the period.

Chapbooks are small books of poems, essays, or fiction. This chapbook collection consists of over 200 volumes published from 2000 to 2019, and includes works by Queens College faculty member Kimiko Hahn and other writers and poets like Sandra Cisneros, Stephen Dunn, and Louise Glück.

Plays of the Spanish Golden Age were published in collection (parte) or separately (suelta). Comedias sueltas were published in Spain from the early 1600s to around 1850. The suelta (lit. “loose”) format consisted of a single play printed in a small pamphlet, although many were later bound into collected volumes. This collection consists of more than 160 items, mostly from the eighteenth century, and includes works by famous dramatists like Lope de Vega and Pedro Calderón de la Barca.

The Don Quixote Collection is comprised of valuable editions of and related works about Miguel De Cervantes’ Don Quixote spanning over 300 years. The collection contains original and facsimile editions in English, Spanish, and Italian, in a variety of sizes and bindings, and related works by other authors.

Consisting of materials from the early years of print history, the Early Rare Books Collection is currently comprised of 34 titles from the 16th and 17th centuries. It includes early printed books in a variety of sizes, languages, bindings, and conditions.

Curated sets of issues of homophile (pre-Stonewall LGBTQ+) advocacy and community publications the Mattachine Review and The Ladder.

James Forman was an important figure in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, serving as Executive Secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) between 1961-1966, and a life-long intellectual and activist. The James Forman Library includes approximately 1,940 books; four thousand printed items (comprised of pamphlets, serials, and reports); ten linear feet of FBI files; five linear feet of media materials; and three linear feet of personal papers.

This collection contains 150 objects from a portfolio set of “Pages From the Past”, collected and distributed by the now-defunct Society of Foliophiles in New York. They are individual leaves from original printed books and manuscripts in several languages, providing a compact yet extensive history of Western bookmaking from ancient Sumeria to the twentieth-century United States.

Near complete run (123 issues) of the journal Radical America, spanning from 1967 to 1992.

The Restaurant Menu collection is an intentional collection aggregated over several decades and consists of materials and objects spanning from 1938 to the present. The collection is made-up largely of paper-based ephemeral objects.