Teaching Book History in Special Collections

MU's cuneiform tablets are listed under museum numbers that begin with MULC.

Dime novels were published from the middle nineteenth century through the early twentieth century and were largely pulp fiction aimed at a young male audience.

A fine press is a printing establishment that adheres to particularly high standards in terms of the skill of the workers, the choice of materials, and the overall design of the books ultimately produced. The spirit of the fine press movement continues in the ongoing revival of the techniques of letterpress printing, but the movement itself is usually dated to the years 1891-1939.

Dr. Frank Luther Mott’s library of American best sellers is held in Special Collections. Dr. Mott endeavored to purchase a copy of each book included in his study of American best sellers, preferring a first edition when one could be located. Mott defined best sellers as books known (or believed) to have had total sales equal to one percent of the population of the continental United States (or the English colonies in the years before the revolution) for the decades they were published.

In the late 1940s, Helen Montgomery Jenkins and her first husband, Paul Jarboe Montgomery, inherited a collection of Kipling editions from Flora V. Livingston, Montgomery's great-aunt. Livingston was a rare book librarian at Harvard University's Widener Library, and she published a bibliography of Kipling's works in 1927. Jenkins began to buy materials to add to the collection. Her book collecting interests also included fore-edge paintings and pop-up books. Jenkins bequeathed her Kipling and fore-edge painting collections to the University of Missouri Libraries upon her death in 2013.

The Department of Rare Books and Special collections maintains a small collection of incunabula (books printed before 1501) and early printed material.

The University of Missouri acquired the collection of Geoffroi Jacques Flach (1846-1919) in 1920. Dr. Flach's collection included several fine examples of medieval manuscripts and printing.

John Gneisenau Neihardt (1881-1973) accepted a position at the University of Missouri-Columbia's Department of English in 1949 following an illustrious career working as a writer, poet, and journalist, and with Native Americans. His involvement with them began in 1900 at the Omaha Indian Reservation; he later became closely associated with the Sioux holy man Black Elk. Americana and literature, especially poetry, are the strengths of the collection. However, Mr. Neihardt's eclectic interests are evident in the collection's broad subject coverage. The Neihardt Collection contains 3897 volumes of scarce literary and historical works and first editions.

Pages from the Past is a collection of manuscript and rare book leaves compiled and sold by a New York book dealer Alfred W. Stites from 1964 to 1967. Each set of Pages from the Past is unique. This collection is labeled Set no. I, “The History of the Written Word”. This is version “B” from the Stites’ third “release” of sets. Within the set I it is no.14 of 15 sets.

The collection contains material on private and specialty presses, dating primarily from the 1980s to the present. Many items in the collection are prospectuses and offerings of new books by the presses. The items are often specially printed on unusual and handmade papers or with special printing techniques.

Thomas Moore Johnson (1851-1919) was an attorney, collector, and student of philosophy in Osceola, Missouri. Though his formal training in philosophy was sparse, his consummate philosophical interests led him to become a foremost lay authority on Plato and the Neoplatonists. Johnson began collecting Greek texts while a student at the University of Notre Dame and his library eventually grew to about 8,000 volumes. A portion of his library was presented to the University of Missouri-Columbia Libraries in 1947 by his son, Franklin P. Johnson.

Almost 900 Greek manuscripts and some of the most important papyri, ranging in date from the first to the 18th centuries, are now included in the Digitised Manuscripts site.

Digital Scriptorium is a growing consortium of American libraries and museums committed to free online access to their collections of pre-modern manuscripts. The website unites scattered resources from many institutions into a national digital platform for teaching and scholarly research.

The Folger Shakespeare Library offers a broad array of online resources to aid students and scholars with their research on Shakespeare and the early modern period.

The Lawrence J. Schoenberg Collection includes nearly three hundred manuscripts and documents ranging in date from ca. 1900BC to the 20th century, with particular focus on the eras of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

This page is an inventory of all medieval and Renaissance manuscript materials in Special Collections with links to digitized content where applicable.

With more than 900 illuminated manuscripts, 1,250 of the first printed books (ca. 1455 - 1500), and an important collection of post-1500 deluxe editions, this extraordinary collection chronicles the art of the book over more than 1,000 years.