Special Collections and Archives

Special Collections is home to over 30,000 rare books, periodicals, and pamphlets printed before 1851, along with some later rarities. Our Archive collections, which number over 200, cover a broad range of subjects of academic interest, which have flourished over the years as new research interests.

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An image of an open book inside a display case.

About Special Collections and Archives

Our special collections and archives provide primary source material to support teaching and research for members of the University faculty-wide, as well as those from other national and international institutions, and independent researchers.

Our collections’ particular strengths are in Restoration drama, English Civil War tracts, travel and exploration from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, social and political caricatures from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, artists’ and private press books, and avant-garde poetry pamphlets from the 1950s to the present day.

Our archives are collections of the papers of individuals and organisations. Examples include the Hartlib Papers (correspondence to the seventeenth century polymath Samual Hartlib), the Jack Rosenthal Drama Scripts Collection, the Papers of Richard Hoggart, the British Union (of Fascists) Collection, and the Papers of Sir Hans Krebs, Nobel Prize-winning biochemist. Recent acquisitions include the papers of the British communist journalist Alan Winnington, the archives of politician David Blunkett, and the papers of the poet Peter Redgrove.

We hold specialised, usually subject-based, book collections such as the Holocaust Collection, the Left Book Club Collection, and the Elmfield Collection (glassmaking). Our book collections also include personal libraries, often including rare, unusual, or annotated volumes.

Highlights of our Special Collections:

The Rare Books Collection

The Rare Books Collection consists mainly of volumes printed before 1851, but it also contains titles published after that date if they are rare or interesting in other ways such as signed or annotated. The collection covers many subject areas including history, language and literature, drama, mathematics and all the sciences, philosophy, religion, architecture, law, natural sciences, and travel and exploration. Several thousand volumes were presented by the Sheffield-born historian Sir Charles Harding Firth (1857-1936) soon after the opening of the University in 1905. Firth had been Lecturer in Modern History in Firth College before becoming Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford.

Among Firth’s donation is an extensive collection of English Civil War tracts, a collection of hundreds of 18th and 19th century caricatures by artists such as George Cruikshank and Thomas Rowlandson, which are in the process of being digitised, and a notable 17th century (Restoration) drama collection.

Contemporaneous to Firth, the Reverend John E. B. Mayor (1825-1910) donated over 200 rare books from his own library. Mayor was a classics scholar at Cambridge, a noted vegetarian and campaigner for a vegetarian lifestyle. His donation consists of mostly Latin and Greek texts, but does include other languages.

The Private Presses Collection

The origins of the Private Presses Collection lay in the 1960s with a generous donation, and a legacy. Sheffield-based artist and entrepreneur Annie Bindon Carter visited the newly-built Western Bank Library in 1962 and donated the sum of £1,000 (over £20,000 in today’s money) specifically for the purchase of artists’ books. She wanted students to be able to read outside of their areas of study to broaden their education, and be changed by art. Inspired by Carter, alumna Dorothy May Goodby bequeathed her estate to the University and declared that the artists’ books collection should benefit from the yearly interest of her investment, something that continues to this day.

The Private Presses Collection includes examples of key British independent fine presses founded by book artists such as Ron King (Circle Press), Ian Tyson (Tetrad Press, ed.it), Tom Phillips (Talfourd Press), and Ken Campbell. It also includes important works by William Morris’s Kelmscott Press, Golden Cockerell Press, the Nonesuch Press, the Chiswick Press, Petersburg Press, Editions Electo, and many others.

Special Political Collections

Over the years, our special collections have been developed and used for teaching and research at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. The most well-established and numerous of these are the left- and right-wing politics collections which between them include several hundred books and pamphlets some of which are scarce copies. The book collections run in parallel with similarly themed archive collections.

The Small Press Poetry Collection

This collection contains material unavailable in any other British institution. It focuses on British and American poetry and art of the avant-garde from the late 1950s onwards. We are also developing our British Poetry Revival pamphlets, and more recently published titles from young, independent presses. The collection is continually being added to in support of teaching and research with a focus on Black Mountain, the New York School, and the San Francisco Renaissance. Recent acquisitions include artist William Copley’s S.M.S. portfolio (1968), and former academic Gordon Brotherston’s papers and pamphlet collection, notable for its collection of Edward Dorn titles and modern poetry in translation.

Unique to the United Kingdom, the University of Sheffield Library holds complete collections of two significant Canadian small presses: Weed/Flower Press, founded and run by the prize-winning poet Nelson Ball; and Seripress, founded and run by the painter and poet (and wife of Nelson Ball), Barbara Caruso.

Here are some highlights of our Archive Collections:

Madeleine Blaess Diaries

Madeleine Blaess was born in Alsace-Lorraine, France in 1918. As a child, she moved to York with her parents and then went to Leeds University to study French in 1936. She graduated with a First Class Honours degree in 1939, and in October 1939 secured a bursary for doctoral research at the University of Paris and at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes.

She was unable to return to Britain in 1940 due to the rapid German advance and so spent the war in occupied Paris. Madeleine kept a diary for the next 4 years as a replacement for sending letters to her parents. She recorded a day-by-day account of life under Occupation, as she continued to pursue her goal of becoming an academic under increasingly difficult physical conditions and psychological strain.

In October 1948, she was appointed lecturer in the Department of French at the University of Sheffield, where she remained until her retirement in 1983, having concentrated her research and teaching on mediaeval French. Madeleine Blaess died in 2003 and she bequeathed her books and papers to the University.

The diaries are kept in the University of Sheffield Special Collections and are written in French. They have been edited and translated by Dr Wendy Michallat, titled 320 rue St Jacques, The Diary of Madeleine Blaess, published by the White Rose University Press.