The Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library

The Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library represents an irreplaceable cultural repository that is used to enrich the University’s educational mission in every possible way. Traditionally, special collections were designed for scholars: for University faculty, graduate students, and visitors who came from institutions around the world to study the holdings.

But now the Small Special Collections Library meets even broader educational needs. Undergraduate students use the collections, experiencing primary research firsthand. The Small Library serves as both an archive of the scale and significance of a museum and as a permanent gallery available to the public.

Among the many treasures in the Small Special Collections Library are the McGregor Library, the Clifton Waller Barrett (College ’50) Library, the William Faulkner Collection, and the Thomas Jefferson Papers.

The library houses Declaring Independence: Creating and Re-creating America’s Document, a display of Albert H. Small’s unique and rare collection of items relating to the Declaration of Independence. This exhibit includes a “Dunlap broadside,” the very first printing of the Declaration. There are only twenty-six known copies in existence.

Most notably, the collection contains the following:

• Manuscripts and first editions of classics such as James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pathfinder, Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.
• The Presidential papers of James Madison, James Monroe, and Thomas Jefferson, including Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia.
• Letters, literary manuscripts, and first editions of Edgar Allan Poe, Willa Cather, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, and Jorge Luis Borges.
• Jefferson’s drawings of the Academical Village, hailed as the most outstanding architectural achievement in this country since 1776 and named to the World Heritage List.
• Manuscripts and printed accounts of the earliest explorations and colonization of the New World, including one of the three known copies of a 1495 poetical paraphrase by G. Dati of Christopher Columbus’s first letter announcing the discovery of the New World.

The Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library needs funds for building and maintaining the collection and services.