The Providence Athenaeum: Collections Index

General Collection

The Athenaeum houses more than 150,000 books, recorded books, periodicals, video recordings and other materials. Areas of strength in this circulating collection include biography, current fiction and mystery, poetry, history and travel.

Special Collections

The special collections at the Providence Athenaeum reflect the reading tastes of its membership since the founding of the library in 1753. Strengths of the collection are Old Fiction which include rare first editions of novels by well known 19th century authors such as Walt Whitman, Herman Melville and Jane Austen, the Travel and Exploration collection including Ptolemy's Cosmographia (1482), and the Robert Burns collection. The library owns two medieval manuscripts and eight incunabula. In addition, the Providence Athenaeum was an original subscriber to John James Audubon's Birds of America (1827-38). There are approximately 20,000 volumes housed in the Philbrick Rare Book Room.

Get further information on these collections.

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