No simple listing can be made of the strengths of the John Carter Brown Library as a resource for scholarship. The collection of 50,000 rare books (printed before ca. 1825) and 16,000 reference books and secondary sources (printed after ca. 1825) is distinguished in a dozen subject areas and significant in many others. Most well-known, perhaps, are the Library’s extensive holdings in the literature of European exploration and travel in the Western Hemisphere, from the first Latin edition of the Columbus letter of 1493, through nearly all of the contemporary narratives of Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, and English discovery, exploration, and settlement. [ Search the collection. ]

Documentation is equally strong in the sources that record the profound impression made by the wonders of the New World on European culture. The Library’s collection of pre-1800 German and Italian books about America, for example, is among the richest in the United States. The geography and anthropology of the Americas, the economic incentives for colonization, the social and political character of New World settlements, and the response of indigenous peoples to the European incursion are all well covered in the collection. The Library’s extensive holdings in early Latin American and North American imprints, as well as in related European materials, make it possible for researchers to study colonial events from the broadest possible perspective.

Finally, the Library’s century-old interest in buying printed and manuscript sources specifically illustrative of the interaction of Europeans and Americans has continuously enriched the collection. Few research centers are better equipped than the John Carter Brown Library to answer questions concerning, for example, slavery, missionary work, the growth of natural science, and anticolonial revolutions in the New World. As an assemblage simply of rare and valuable books and maps, the holdings of the JCB are outstanding; as a collection that is focused and directed toward providing understanding of a particular historical era, namely the colonial period of the Americas, it is a library uniquely suited to sustaining fruitful scholarship.

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