Location: 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino, CA 91108
Contact: 626-405-2100, publicinformation@huntington.org
Access: Must apply, see website
Website address: http://www.huntington.org/
The Huntington Library is one of the largest and most complete research libraries in the United States in its fields of specialization. The Library’s collection of rare books, manuscripts, prints, photographs, maps, and other materials in the fields of British and American history and literature totals more than nine million items. The Library collections date from the Middle Ages to the 21st century. The greatest concentration is in the English Renaissance, about 1500 to 1641; other strengths include medieval manuscripts, incunabula (books printed before 1501), maps, travel literature, British and American history and literature, the American Southwest, and the history of science, medicine and technology. “Beautiful Science: Ideas that Changed the World,” a permanent exhibit in The Huntington’s Dibner Hall, encourages visitors to think about the beauty of science in a historical context—the elegant breakthroughs, the remarkable discoveries, and the amazing people and stories behind them. The exhibit is arranged around four areas of exploration: astronomy, natural history, medicine, and light.
The Manuscripts collection contains nearly six million manuscripts dealing with English and American history and literature from the 11th century to the present, and with the complementary fields of European medieval manuscripts, Renaissance exploration and cartography, Latin American history, and the History of Science and Technology. One strength includes the development of American observational astronomy in the 20th century.
The Huntington Library houses approximately 500,000 prints and negatives spanning the century from 1850 to 1950. This superlative collection, which covers a variety of topics from the American Civil War to the building of the transcontinental railroad, from “Grand Tours” of Europe to modest family photograph albums, is particularly strong in depicting the history and development of the American West.
The rare book collection includes printed books from the 15th through the 20th centuries. The collection also houses maps, broadsides, pamphlets, newspapers, and many other printed formats. These collections of about 375,000 items are concentrated in the field of British and American culture with many topics and periods covered in extraordinary depth.
The historical print collection at The Huntington consists of over 250,000 images, which portray aspects of British and American cultural and political life between the 16th and 19th centuries. Depicted in separately issued prints and in extra-illustrated books are portraits, historical scenes/events, political and social caricatures, theatrical and literary history, illustrations to Shakespeare’s plays, Biblical illustrations, British and American views, and British and American trade cards. The Huntington’s archive of ephemera includes several hundred thousand pieces. The collection emphasizes Western history and culture, especially that of Southern California, though the variety of subjects and formats support historical research in general American and British cultural studies. Subjects include but are not limited to American politics, the development of Southern California, theatre and performing arts history, 20th century American railroads, commerce and advertising. The Jay T. Last Collection contains more than 185,000 lithographic prints, posters, and ephemera of mostly nineteenth- and early twentieth- century American origin and represents works by more than five hundred lithographic companies. The collection encompasses a large range of subject matter from beverage labels to firefighting prints. Highlights from the collection are available online here. For more about the historical prints and ephemera collection, view here.
The Huntington Art Collections focus on two distinct areas—European art from the 15th to the early 20th century, and American art from the late 17th to the mid-20th century.
The Huntington Digital Library, representing only a fraction of our holdings, is an online tool to aid in the dissemination of the rich and unique collections. The Library is constantly adding to the online collection. Online collections include selections from the photographs, print and ephemera, rare books, and manuscripts collections; the maps collection; United States Civil War; Los Angeles Area Court Records; and more. The digital library also provides online finding aids.
The Huntington Library also offers Fellowships.
Online exhibitions include A Strange and Fearful Interest: Death, Mourning, and Memory in the American Civil War, which offers selected works and audio commentary by distinguished scholars and artists to explore how photography and other media were used to describe, to explain, and perhaps to come to terms with a brutal, defining period in American history.