Massachusetts

20th Regiment Collection

(Rare Books and Manuscripts) This collection contains books, manuscripts, images, and artifacts relating to military affairs, with a particular focus on the American Civil War and on Massachusetts soldiers and regiments. The collection is particularly strong with respect to regimental histories, containing a near complete run of the General Orders of the various Departments of the Union Army, as well as contemporary sheet music (southern as well as northern). The collection also includes 10 scrapbooks of patriotic envelopes and 9 portfolios of the battle and camp photographs by Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner. In 1896, the surviving members of the 20th Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, donated $10,000 remaining from funds collected for the marble memorial lion in the McKim staircase to establish a special collection of books "of military and patriotic nature."  As part of their original gift, members of the 20th Regiment Association donated copies of their own diaries, reports, and letters. To these have been added other manuscript materials pertaining to both North and South. While works concerning other wars and military engagements are not as extensive, there are interesting items from the War of 1812 and the Mexican War, and the monumental sets of official records of the 1st and 2nd Divisions of the American Expeditionary Force. There are also 345 volumes of personal narratives and other works on World War I, the gift of [Mary Boyle O'Reilly]. The collection continues to grow, now also adding materials focusing on Massachusetts' participation in World Wars I and II. (Rare Books & Manuscripts)

Adams, John (1735-1826) Library

Deposited with the Boston Public Library in 1894, the John Adams Library includes over 3,000 volumes collected by the second president during his lifetime (1735-1826) as well as many volumes donated by members of his family. One of the greatest private collections of its day, the Adams Library remains one of the largest colonial American libraries still intact. This remarkable collection represents the intellectual tastes of an influential thinker, writer, and political philosopher who helped shape the Constitution of the United States and drafted the Massachusetts Constitution, the oldest functioning written constitution in the world. John Adams’s library spans the fields of classics, literature, history, politics, government, philosophy, religion, law, science, mathematics, medicine, agriculture, language and linguistics, economics, and travel. The collection is of particular interest to scholars and historians because Adams recorded thousands of interpretive and critical manuscript annotations in the margins of hundreds of his books. Online access: The collection has been electronically cataloged and can be retrieved through either of the online catalogs. In the research catalog, opens a new window, use an author search for "Adams, John, 1735-1826, former owner". In the catalog, opens a new window use a title search for "John Adams Library (Boston Public Library)" With limited exceptions, the John Adams Library collection has been fully digitized and made available online through Internet Archive. A digitized copy of the 1917 printed catalog is also available. In addition, LibraryThing has compiled a complete catalog of books known to be owned by John Adams held across institutions. The LibraryThing catalog also includes links to digitized copies and unedited transcriptions of many of Adams's annotations in the "Comments" field. (Rare Books & Manuscripts)

Adlow Collection of Boston Legal History

(Rare Books & Manuscripts) An extensive collection of documents and judicial records from Suffolk County, Massachusetts, dating from 1711 through 1904, with a primary focus on the years 1800 through 1825. The collection contains files of the Suffolk County Justice of the Peace, Court of Common Pleas, General Sessions of the Peace, and Supreme Judicial Court. The core of the collection is comprised of nearly 23,000 writs of attachment, opens a new window and writs of execution, opens a new window, organized chronologically and under the justices who issued them. The collection also contains runs of other documentation, sometimes substantially complete, including: coroner’s records and inquests dating from 1775 through 1860; lists of prisoners; warrants, recognizances, summonses, dockets, criminal complaints, opinions and judgments, jury materials (lists of jurors, indictments, etc.), petitions, militia delinquencies, complaints to the Health Department; accounts, expenses, and miscellaneous bills; documents relating to construction of the Leverett Street Jail, opens a new window and the Suffolk County Courthouse on School Street, opens a new window; papers of individual judges, and many additional materials. Though the Adlow Collection is comprised largely of judicial records, it is also an extremely rich source for studies in the social history of Boston. Individual documents often contain specific details and narratives of events in the lives of ordinary Bostonians recorded in no other sources. The collection is named after Elijah Adlow (1896-1982), Chief Justice of the Municipal Court of the City of Boston. In 1954, Judge Adlow was notified that, due to an immediate need for space, a collection of "rubbish" long stored in an old basement vault of the courthouse was being considered for removal and incineration. Upon inspecting the materials in question, Adlow recognized their historical significance and the urgent need for their preservation. Having halted the destruction of the entire cache, Adlow later arranged for the materials to be transferred to the Boston Public Library. Comprising approximately 40,000 items, the collection is organized into several different categories, described and processed at varying levels of detail. As of 2020, the collection is primarily accessible through a set of printed finding aids kept in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Department. For further information about use and access, consult the catalog record, opens a new window. (Rare Books & Manuscripts)

Anti-Slavery Collection

  The nucleus of this collection was presented to the Library in the late 1890s by the family of William Lloyd Garrison and other individuals involved in the anti-slavery movement. The collection features artifacts, books, documents, letters, and pamphlets from Boston reformer Wendell Phillips and the letters and papers of orator and abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison dating from the 1830s through the 1870s, totaling more than 16,000 items. The collection also contains daguerreotypes of noted abolitionists; the papers of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society; and the papers of Maria Weston Chapman and Deborah Weston, Amos Augustus Phelps, Lydia Maria Child, Samuel Joseph May, and John Bishop Estlin. Other items include the full run and the account books of the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator; records of the American, New England, and Massachusetts Anti-Slavery societies; scrapbooks concerning Anthony Burns and John Brown; and the files of Ziba B. Oakes, a slave broker from Charleston, South Carolina.  The library also has extensive holdings of printed material relating to the anti-slavery movement. The libraries of William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Theodore Parker are here, all rich in relevant pamphlets and broadsides. The Hunt Collection on the West Indies is another fine resource from a different perspective, as is the E.A. Phelps British Anti-Slavery Society Papers. In addition, an 89-page unpublished typed index to The Liberty Bell is available in the Rare Books Department. Online access: For more information about the collection, including its contents, history, and organization, please consult the BPL research guide, opens a new window. (Rare Books & Manuscripts)

Harry C. Bentley Collection of Works on Bookkeeping

(Rare Books & Manuscripts) This collection of approximately 700 volumes was assembled by Harry C. Bentley, founder of Bentley College in Waltham, Massachusetts. In assembling the collection, Bentley sought to gather a copy of the first edition of every book on accounting written by an American author between 1796 and 1900. Bentley donated the collection to the BPL in 1933. The Harry C. Bentley Collection of Works on Bookkeeping documents the history of American business, business education, and the accounting practices used by American businesses -- small and large -- during the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. Researchers working in other fields, but who are interested in better understanding early American ledgers, receipt books, and other accounting records, can find in this collection detailed descriptions of how such documents were created and used. The shelf list for the Bentley Collection contains a comprehensive list of holdings.

Lewis, John A. Collection of early New England imprints

(Rare Books & Manuscripts) John Allen Lewis of Boston (1819-1885), was a collector of early New England imprints with a particular interest in the earliest Boston printing presses. The collection bearing his name was donated to the BPL in 1890, 5 years after his death.  The Lewis collection is particularly rich in editions from the press of John Foster, including a copy of the first book printed in Boston: Increase Mather's The Wicked Man's Portion (1675). The collection also contains several works by William Penn and more than 200 works by Increase and Cotton Mather. Additional highlights include William Hubbard’s Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians, with the "White Hills" map (1677); John Underhill’s Newes from America (1638); and the Massachusetts Psalter (1709). The Lewis collection also contains several of the issues from Benjamin Franklin’s press, including copies of the Poor Richard Almanack. Online access: A digitized version of the printed catalog of this collection, opens a new window is available through Internet Archive. (Rare Books & Manuscripts)

Prince, Thomas Library of the Old South Church

(Rare Books & Manuscripts) The Thomas Prince Collection and Library of the Old South Church -- usually just referred to as the Prince Collection -- is a group of approximately 3,500 books and 950 manuscripts assembled primarily by Old South pastors Thomas Prince (1687-1758) and Joseph Sewall (1688-1769). One of the few colonial American libraries to survive largely intact, the Prince Collection is a major resource for studies in the history of early New England. It is also an important resource for historians of the colonial American book. The collection preserves rare and sometimes unique pieces of evidence from the earliest presses in British North America, while contemporary inscriptions, annotations, and marginalia document the reception and circulation of texts in Boston, New England, and throughout the early modern Atlantic world. Holdings are particularly rich in early New England history and literature, along with theological works of the 17th and 18th centuries. Among other highlights, it includes the Bay Psalm Book, opens a new window (1640), and John Eliot's Indian Bible, opens a new window (1663), with many other editions representative of both the varied outputs of the early Cambridge and Boston presses, and of the intellectual life of colonial New England. Throughout the collection, evidence of book production and readerly intervention is rich and varied. Early Boston bookbinders are particularly well represented, with specimens from the workshops of Edmund Ranger and John Ratcliffe, among others. Contemporary bindings made with recycled paper preserve many fragments of early manuscripts and printed books. Many volumes, too, are annotated by successive generations of owners, while duplicate copies held throughout the collection facilitate close comparison and bibliographic study.  In addition to printed materials, the collection also contains a significant body over manuscripts, including a major collection of historical papers gathered and preserved by Prince himself. These manuscripts include papers of the Mather family, papers of the Cotton family, a group of papers relating to both the Cotton and Prince families, opens a new window, papers of the Hinckley family, and papers related to the case of Torrey v. Gardner (1734). Information and online access

• The BPL research guide for this collection contains a detailed history of the collection, information about how to search for materials, links to related BPL collections, and other useful resources.

Wyeth Family Correspondence

This collection contains 73 letters written by members of the Wyeth family between 1902-1929 and relate family activities, news, and trips. Online finding aid available. (Rare Books & Manuscripts)