Nina Mason Pulliam Indianapolis Special Collections Room - Featured Collections

Featured Collections

Indianapolis Collection Materials include Indianapolis history, city directories, church histories, college and high school yearbooks, biographies, the Indianapolis 500, theater programs, and audio-visual materials.

Indianapolis Authors

• A collection of first editions of Meredith Nicholson, James Whitcomb Riley, Booth Tarkington, and others. This collection has a variety of items beyond books.
• The Kurt Vonnegut Collection consists of many signed first editions in foreign languages as well as representative artwork. In addition, there are over forty loose magazines that carry his articles and stories over the years and copies of screenplays for two works (Slaughter House Five and Slapstick).
• The James Whitcomb Riley Collection has letters, photographs of his last public appearance, his college diploma, and unpublished recordings of him reading his own poetry.
• The Meredith Nicholson Collection contains letters and manuscripts.
• The Booth Tarkington Collection holds an original manuscript of Kate Fennigate, typed pages showing corrections, and the final typed copy of the book.

Children’s Literature Collection Collection of about 2,000 volumes, ranging from Indiana authors, illustrated editions, some award-winning titles, and a variety of historical materials such as prominent Indianapolis children’s authors Eth Clifford, Mabel Leigh Hunt, Jean Brown Wagoner, and Guernsey Van Riper.

Fine Printing Collection This collection began with a substantial gift by G. Harvey Petty. Over the years additional items have been added to this collection, not only in examples of fine printing, but in works about typography and the history of fine printing. A number of examples of local private printing exist, including those from the Grabhorn Press (originally the Studio Press) and Press of the Indiana Kid.

Cookbook and Menu Collection The cookbook collection was a gift of the family of Mr. Wright Marble, a local collector. The original donation included a number of 17th and 18th century English and Italian works, along with German, some Oriental, French, English and United States books published in the 19th century. The oldest title in the collection was published in 1542. Other locally published titles have been added over time.

Another collector, Arthur H. Rumpf, donated a collection of approximately 100 historic menus, including those from railroad dining cars, hotels, and testimonial-recognition dinners. Local menus have been added over the years.

Digital Collections The Library offers free access to digital versions of increasingly valuable, fragile and hard-to-use originals at http://www.imcpl.org/resources/digitallibrary/