Library of Congress: Rare Book Selections (Collection)The collections housed in The Rare Book and Special Collections Division amount to nearly 800,000 books, encompassing nearly all eras and subjects maintained in well over 100 separate collections. All of these collections offer scholarly documentation about the western and American traditions of life and learning. The Division’s collection of nearly 5,700 incunabula (fifteenth-century imprints) is the largest such grouping in the Western Hemisphere. Our Americana collections include more than 16,000 imprints from 1640 to 1800, including the Columbus letter of 1493.
The digitized selections offered here represent a few of the most interesting and important items in the collection, including a copy of the Gutenberg Bible, Thomas Jefferson’s copy of The Federalist, medieval manuscripts, books relating to cookery, children's literature, and many more.