Literary Site Type: Literary Archive

Established in 1969, the Silverado Museum is a non-profit organization that houses one of the world’s most distinguished collections of Stevensoniana. Currently, the museum holds over nine thousand original items, many of which were acquired directly from heirs and friends of the Stevenson family. The collection includes original letters, manuscripts, journals, first, various early editions (including translations and annotated copies), rare periodicals, paintings and drawings, sculptures, photographs, scrapbooks, and memorabilia.

The principal repository of rare books, manuscripts and archival materials at Cornell University, the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections houses 430,000 printed volumes and more than 80 million manuscripts. Notable holdings include the papers and archival materials of James Joyce, E.B. White, Vladimir Nabokov, William Wordsworth, A.R. Ammons, and George Bernard Shaw. The library also serves as a resource center for the study of book history, offering both a semester course in the Cornell English Department and a weeklong summer course for Cornell Adult University. 

The special collections library of Brown University, the John Hay Library contains more than 3,000,000 items. Holdings range from Babylonian clay tablets and Egyptian papyri to current-day books, manuscripts, and ephemera. Among the more unexpected items are portraits and paintings by old masters, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s tea set, Napoleon’s death mask, 6,000 toy soldiers, the last daguerrotype taken of Poe, and Whitman’s personal copy of Leaves of Grass. Other notable holdings include the papers and archival materials of Henry David Thoreau, George Orwell, William Blake, and H. G.

Boston College’s Burns Library is home to more than 250,000 volumes, some 16,000,000 manuscripts and important collections of architectural records, maps, art works, newspapers, photographs, films, prints, artifacts and ephemera. Holdings include manuscripts and published works of Samuel T. Coleridge, Graham Greene, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Evelyn Waugh, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Beckett.