Rare Books

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  1. Search by title, author, and/or subject using the Library Search System 
  2. Filter your search results to only rare materials: select Special Collections and University Archives on the left of your search results under Library.

About the rare book collection

Comprising approximately 12,900 volumes, the rare book collection contains books, broadsides, maps, and other printed material covering a wide variety of subjects and eras.

Collection strengths

Particular subject strengths include the history of Charlotte, Mecklenburg County, and North Carolina; American literature including Black writers; African American history; theology and religion; and children’s literature. Though the majority of imprints date from 1800 to the present, the collection contains a substantial number of books from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, many of which exemplify distinctive early printing and binding techniques. 

Highlights

  • A 1471 Latin edition of sermons on the Book of Job by John Chrysostom, the oldest book in the collection.
  • The Princess Augusta Sophia Collection of English Drama, a group of more than 800 plays published from 1618 to 1826 that were originally assembled by the daughter of King George III and Queen Charlotte of England. Complementing other rare book holdings in eighteenth century literature, the collection provides a revealing window onto the literary tastes and reading habits of the era.
  • Early African American writers, particularly Phillis Wheatley and North Carolina authors such as Charles Chesnutt and Anna Julia Cooper. Includes freedom narratives such as works by Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Moses Grandy, Lunsford Lane, and other formerly enslaved people and Black abolitionists.
  • Distinctive Books in Jewish Thought is a new and rapidly growing collecting area comprising books that evince a significant or unique contribution to the long archive of Jewish thought as it developed across the globe and through millenia. Notable authors include Baruch Spinoza (Benedictus de Spinoza), Primo Levi, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno; Hannah Arendt; Martin Buber; and Moses Mendelssohn.
  • An extensive collection of children’s literature that includes early hornbooks and primers, nineteenth and early twentieth century storybooks, and early editions of the Wizard of Oz and other works by L. Frank Baum.
  • Nineteenth and twentieth-century American literature, including a first edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and early signed editions of works by William Faulkner, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Eugene O’Neill, and Robert Frost.
  • Facsimile reprints that permit access in proxy form to a range of rare books and manuscript materials, ranging from the first folio of Shakespeare to the Bay Psalm book to the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Also of note

Other important holdings chart the history and culture of Charlotte during the nineteenth century and the civil rights era, the explosive growth of the Charlotte region after World War II, and the era of urban renewal that brought dislocating change to Charlotte and led to the destruction of historic African-American neighborhoods.