(Rare Books & Manuscripts) A wealth of material related to drama including works related to burlesque, circus, vaudeville, modern dance, ballet, Yiddish theater, Shakespeare, and opera donated to the Library in 1909. The monographs, now numbering about 7,000 volumes in the collection, are described in an annotated catalog. There are 165 scrapbooks which contain serial and newspaper clippings, magazine articles and theatrical portraits. Among the strong points of the Brown Collection are the 18th and 19th century dramatic periodicals, both English and American; the near complete files of playbills for 19th century Boston theaters; and a collection of 20 unique broadside programs printed before 1801.
For additional theater-related collections, see: the Jack Benny letters and clippings, the Fred Allen collection, the Hanlon Family collection, the Boston Theatre Archives, the Tremont Theatre Archives, the Lila Viles Wyman Collection of the Dance, the Italian Libretti and Ballet Collections, the Bertram E. Adams collection of books relating to magic, and the Lotta Clark pageant collection.
Online access: A digitized catalog for this collection is available through Internet Archive, opens a new window. (Rare Books & Manuscripts)
