Collections in the Chapin Library
- Manuscripts
- Incunabula
- Aldines
- Americana
- English Literature
- Continental (European) Literature
- Classical Literature (Greek and Latin)
- American Literature
- Bibles and Liturgical Works
- History of Science
- Art and Architecture
- Fine Printing and Calligraphy
- Performing Arts
- Children's Books
- Women's Studies
- Food History and Cookbooks
- Magic, Witchcraft, Alchemy, and the Occult
- Sporting and Outdoors Books
- Reference Books
At its founding, the Chapin Library’s collections were divided into eight broad categories – Incunabula (15th-century printed books), Americana, English Literature, Continental (European) Literature, Classical (Greek and Latin) Literature, American Literature, Bibles and Liturgical Works, and the History of Science – together with manuscripts, historical prints, and reference books. Since then, the Library has expanded with a wider variety of subjects and types of material, according to opportunities of gift and purchase and the needs of the Williams curriculum. The Library’s printed holdings are cataloged online in FRANCIS. Finding aids for manuscripts and art objects are available, or are being prepared for posting, on the Chapin web site.
While the Chapin Library is in temporary quarters (until at least summer 2013), most of its books and separate art objects are in off-site storage and not available for use: those affected are indicated in FRANCIS. Many important volumes, however, are held at the Southworth Schoolhouse and may be used in the Chapin Library/College Archives reading room. Manuscript holdings are either at Southworth or can be retrieved (with sufficient notice) from our off-site facility.
The Chapin Library holds a small but choice collection of medieval and Renaissance manuscript books, beginning with a copy of the Gospels in Latin, arranged for reading throughout the year, prepared in Tours, France around the year 800. Each succeeding century is represented by at least one manuscript codex (book), and the 15th century by humanistic manuscripts (Dante, Ovid, Vergil) and books of hours. More modern manuscripts in the Chapin Library include letters by Presidents of the United States; papers of the reformers Samuel Gridley Howe (1801–1876) and Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910), of missionary James Lyman Merrick (1803–1866), of David Dudley Field (1805–1894) and his family, and of statesman Hamilton Fish (1888–1991); and letters and literary manuscripts by authors such as Samuel “Erewhon” Butler, Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Edna Ferber, William Faulkner, George Barr McCutcheon, Edgar Lee Masters, W. Somerset Maugham, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and William Saroyan. Return to top
Incunabula (15th-Century Printed Books)
The Chapin Library contains more than 525 volumes printed during the 15th century, after the invention of printing from moveable type in Europe. This is a substantial collection for any library, let alone one which serves a primarily undergraduate audience. Included are the editio princeps or first printed editions of esteemed classical writers, works of science and art as well as religion and literature, and many of the first books printed in Europe, perhaps most notably the Cicero De Oratore (Subiaco, before 30 September 1465), the earliest extant book printed in Italy. Nearly one hundred of the Chapin incunabula are preserved in contemporary bindings. Return to top
Some one hundred works from the press of Aldus Manutius, the great Venetian printer and publisher, and his heirs are in the Chapin Library. Among these are the Aristotle Opera (Greek, 1495–98), the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499, the quintessential book of the Italian Renaissance), and the pocket-sized Vergil of 1501, the first book set throughout in italic type. Return to top
The Library’s rich Americana holdings document the history of the Western Hemisphere, especially the United States, beginning with two editions (Rome, 1493 and Basel, 1494) of the letter by Christopher Columbus to the Spanish court announcing his discoveries of 1492. Although the collection has particular strengths from the roughly four hundred-year period ending with the Civil War and Reconstruction, it also includes more recent works, such as books and pamphlets related to the Civil Rights Movement of the 20th century. African-American and Native American studies at Williams are supported by a growing body of literature, and there are substantial collections of works by and about Daniel Webster (1782–1852), Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924), Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) [WORD], and David Dudley Field (1805–1894) and his family. The Chapin Library also contains numerous American manuscripts and historical prints and the Robert P. Fordyce, Class of 1956 collection of some 10,000 stereo views (stereoscopic prints), mostly of American subjects. The Founding Documents of the United States – original printings of the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights – together with George Washington’s copy of The Federalist (1788) and the September 1776 British reply to the Declaration – are on display in the Williams College Museum of Art until the Chapin Library returns to Stetson Hall from temporary quarters. Return to top
This extensive collection ranges from the 16th century to the present and includes first and other significant editions by authors from Geoffrey Chaucer to Virginia Woolf. Among these are all four Shakespeare folios (and a variant printing of the Third), much else by poets and playwrights of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, and significant holdings of Austen, the Brontës, Byron, Coleridge, Defoe, Dickens, Dryden, George Eliot, Fielding, Goldsmith, Dr. Johnson, Keats, Milton, William Morris, Scott, Shelley, and Thackeray. Several authors are represented by special collections formed mostly by alumni and friends: Samuel “Erewhon” Butler, Rupert Brooke, Sir Winston S. Churchill [WORD], Joseph Conrad, R.B. Cunninghame-Graham, T.S. Eliot, James Elroy Flecker, James Joyce, and Rudyard Kipling. Also in the Library is a collection of English broadside ballads. Return to top
Continental (European) Literature
The Library’s collection of continental literature, language, and culture is divided into French, German, Italian, and Spanish, in addition to classical Greek and Latin (see below). It includes important works by authors such as Ariosto, Boccaccio, Cervantes, Corneille, Dante, Dürer, Goethe, Luther, Molière, and Montaigne. Return to top
Among the Library’s holdings of Greek and Latin classics are the first printed editions of authors such as Aesop, Aristophanes, and Homer, the first classical text printed in England (Aristotle, Ethica ad Nicomachum, Oxford, 1479); and the first classical text printed anywhere (Cicero, De Oratore, Subiaco, Italy, before 30 September 1465). Allied with these are a selection of Greek manuscript fragments on papyri from Oxyrhynchus, medieval Greek and Latin manuscripts, and fine 15th-century humanistic manuscripts of Ovid and Vergil. Return to top
This distinguished collection begins in the 18th century with authors such as Anne Bradstreet and Timothy Dwight, through the works of Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier et al. in the 19th century, and continues with 20th-century writers such as Ernest Hemingway and James Michener. Especially noteworthy holdings include works by George Ade, Gelett Burgess, Stephen Crane, William Faulkner, Oliver Herford, Sinclair Lewis, Herman Melville, Edwin Arlington Robinson, William Saroyan, Booth Tarkington, Carolyn Wells, and Walt Whitman. The Library also holds, by deposit of the Trustees of Reservations, an important collection of manuscripts, drawings, documents, and photographs devoted to William Cullen Bryant and his family. Return to top
In addition to the printed texts of many of the world’s great Bibles, the Library has a few manuscript versions, the most important of which are the Tours Gospels, circa 800 C.E., written in one of the scriptoria established by the Emperor Charlemagne, and a Greek New Testament, Codex Theodori, dated 1295. Also here are a selection of manuscript and printed books of hours, psalters, and prayer books. Among the Library’s rarest printed Bibles, besides a leaf from the Gutenberg Bible (Mainz, ca. 1455), are Fust & Schoeffer’s New Testament (1462), the Geneva Bible (1560), the Bishop’s Bible (1568), the first edition of the King James Version of the English Bible (1611), a fine copy of Eliot’s Indian Bible (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1661, 1663), Baskerville’s Bible (1763), the first American Hebrew Bible (1814), and early vernacular editions ranging from Anglo-Saxon to Syriac. Return to top
The Chapin Library’s History of Science collection includes such diverse items as Agricola’s De Re Metallica (1561), Audubon’s Viviparous Quadrupeds (1845–54), Catesby’s Natural History (1731–43), De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium by Copernicus (1543, 1566), Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), Einstein’s contributions to Annalen der Physick (1905), editions of Euclid beginning with the editio princeps (1482), Fulton’s Canal Navigation (1796), the scarce first edition of Harvey’s De Motu Cordis (1628), Hooke’s Micrographia (1667), Newton’s Opticks (1704), White’s Natural History of Selborne (1798), a special mimeographed copy of the Smyth Report on the atomic bomb (1945), and the Duane W. Bailey collection [WORD] of books on bees and beekeeping. Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry, Geology, Mathematics, Natural History, and Physics are all represented. Of particular interest are holdings of herbals and illustrated botanical works from 1484 and later, and more than two hundred volumes devoted to ornithology, including the double elephant folio edition of Audubon’s Birds of America (1827–38) and forty-two volumes of the works of John Gould. The Library’s Sporting and Outdoors Books collection (see below) also has applications to Science, especially Environmental Studies. Return to top
Besides a wide array of illuminated and decorated manuscripts and books, hundreds of illustrated books, books with inserted prints, contemporary artist’s books, and rare books about art, architecture, and crafts, the Chapin Library contains numerous separate prints, posters, paintings, drawings, photographs, and ephemera. These separate materials are contained primarily in the Library’s Graphic Arts and Performing Arts collections, or are adjuncts to literary and historical collections. The Samuel “Erewhon” Butler Collection, for instance, includes paintings and drawings by Butler, a talented amateur artist, and his photographs of religious sculpture at Varallo in northern Italy. Archives of poster artist and illustrator C.B. Falls (1874–1960), architect and artist Herman Rosse (1887–1965), wood-engraver John DePol (1913–2004), artist and designer Pauline Baynes (1922–2008), and Berkshire County printmaker Julio Granda are also in the Chapin Library. Included among these are hundreds of prints, paintings, drawings, sketches, proofs, and fabric designs, as well as working books and papers. The Library also holds a major collection of materials by and about architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959). Return to top
The Chapin Library collections contain many of the landmarks of the history of printing, from a leaf from the Gutenberg Bible to works by the great typographers and book designers of the present day. In the latter category, the Library holds thousands of books, broadsides, and pieces of ephemera produced by both major and minor private presses and fine printers. These include work by the Allen, Ashendene, Cummington, Daniel, Doves, Elston, Gehenna, Golden Cockerel, Grabhorn, Kelmscott, Nonesuch, Overbrook, Rampant Lions, Stinehour, and Whittington presses, among many others, by typographers such as Will Bradley, Theodore L. DeVinne, W.A. Dwiggins, F.W. Goudy, Bruce Rogers, and D.B. Updike, and by publishers such as the Imprint Society and the Limited Editions Club. The Chapin Library has collected as well a large number of artist’s books and livres d'artistes, notably titles by the Kaldewey Press and by the Welsh printmaker and poet Shirley Jones (b. 1934). Also here are an archive of engraved letter designs by Leo Wyatt (1909–1981) and three calligraphic slate tablets from the workshop of David Kindersley (1915–1995). Return to top
The Performing Arts collection of the Chapin Library includes numerous books, broadsides, posters, photographs, and programs from the fields of theater, film, music, dance, and puppetry. Associated materials are found also in the Library’s Herman Rosse archive, which contains hundreds of paintings, drawings, and set and costume designs made by Mr. Rosse for the stage and cinema, as well as his Academy Award for Art Direction for King of Jazz (1930) and his prototype design for the Tony Award. The Library’s archive of writer and filmmaker John Sayles (b. 1950, Williams Class of 1972) includes scripts, working papers and videos, and documentation. Return to top
The Chapin Library’s collection of children’s books ranges from editions of Aesop and Comenius in the late 17th century to works by contemporary author-illustrators such as Pauline Baynes, C.B. Falls, Maurice Sendak, and Dr. Seuss. Among its highlights are the first English edition (1823–66) of the Grimms’ Popular Stories, illustrated by George Cruikshank, first editions of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books (1866, 1872), original printings of Randolph Caldecott’s picture books (1878–85), and miniature almanacs (1883–97) by Kate Greenaway. Return to top
Women’s Studies materials are actively acquired for our history, literature, and science collections, and are specially indexed within the Library by date and language. Return to top
The Library contains approximately 500 American cookbooks, mainly from the 19th century, the gift of Mrs. Eleanor T. Fordyce. These are useful not only for their recipes, but also as windows into American culture at a time long past. Also here is a growing collection of rare books in the field of French cuisine. Return to top
Magic, Witchcraft, Alchemy, and the Occult
A finding aid to Chapin Library holdings in these subjects may be found here. Return to top
This category is intended to encompass all aspects of sport and the outdoors, but especially fishing (angling), hunting, and mountaineering. The collection was begun with gifts of fishing books by Robert A. DeVilbiss, Class of 1933, and J. Brooks Hoffman, M.D., Class of 1940, and by the bequest of Francis S. Woods. It also includes several works from Mr. Chapin’s foundation gift, notably the first five editions of Izaak Walton’s Compleat Angler. In December 2000 the Library received 95 additional angling books and 110 hunting books, including several classics of early 19th-century color-plate field sports literature, given by Mr. and Mrs. Robert C. Neff, from the collection of his uncle, Robert Carey, Jr., Class of 1920. Return to top
Thousands of volumes are held by the Chapin Library to help locate and interpret rare books and manuscripts. These include bibliographies, critical and historical works, and periodicals. Return to top