Rare Book School - Collections

Collections

RBS has a collection of printing presses and equipment that includes a full-scale reproduction of a wooden common press (of the sort Benjamin Franklin might have used), a 19th-century Washington iron hand-press (such presses could be broken down and loaded into a Conestoga wagon), and a 20th-century flatbed cylinder proof press (a Vandercook SP-15, favorite of modern private-press letterpress printers). RBS's printing-house comprises 200 cases of printing type (including the 48-case Annenberg collection of wood type), a small Brand etching press, and various pieces of hand bookbinding equipment.

RBS owns about 50,000 books and 20,000 prints, dating from the 15th century to the present. Many of the books—including a large collection assembled to illustrate the history of cloth bookbindings—are on display in the McGregor Room of Alderman Library. Others may be seen in glass-fronted bookcases in the Dome Room of the Rotunda (the original library of the University), located a short distance from Alderman Library on the Central Grounds of the University. Other collections are kept in the RBS classroom and studio—rooms which, together with the Pressroom, make up the RBS suite in Alderman Library.

RBS classes make heavy use of the RBS collections. The institute annually attracts about 300 students, who come for one or more five-day non-credit courses taught by an international roster of specialists in the history of the manuscript book, typography, book illustration, bookbinding, descriptive bibliography, rare book librarianship, and related subjects. While they are at U.Va., many RBS students and faculty members live on the Lawn in rooms designed by Thomas Jefferson, the founder of the University.

The physical arrangement of the RBS book and print collection supports both classroom and independent study. The books are generally shelved by date (rather than by author or subject), to show the chronological development of parchment, leather, cloth, and paper bindings. Many of the prints are filed by technique (rather than by artist or engraver), to facilitate the identification of illustration processes. Other RBS collection arrangements assist the study of various formats, genres, materials, and physical features such as sewing structures, endpapers, and dust-jackets. An unusual feature of some of these collections is the presence of multiple copies (sometimes as many as a dozen or more) of the same (or almost the same) book—a duplication valuable not only for facilitating group viewing in the classroom but also for demonstrating the bibliographical principle that almost exactly the same can be another way of saying quite different.

RBS also maintains a library of about 2,000 recently published books on various aspects of the history of the book: paper making, typefounding, typography, printing, illustration, binding, publishing, bookselling, collecting, the antiquarian book trade, and related areas. This non-circulating reference collection ensures that the most useful books for RBS's purposes are always close at hand. Supplementing this library are much larger holdings on the same subjects in the Alderman Library stacks and in various U.Va. special collections.