Curated Selections & Collaborative Efforts at PUL

Manuscripts of the Islamic World offers a curated selection of extraordinary manuscripts hosted or held by Princeton University Library. The manuscripts are predominantly in Arabic, but there are also many in Persian and Ottoman Turkish. The Collections owe their beginnings to the remarkable manuscripts collected and donated by Robert Garrett (class of 1897) from 1900-1943. The Collections continued to grow under the tenure of Enno Littmann, librarian of what was then called the Oriental Collections, and through the bequests of the personal libraries of Rudolf-Ernest Brunnow and David Paton. By 1965, the Collections had become the best in North America, thanks to the efforts made by Rudolph Mach, curator of the Near East Collections from 1955-1977.

The Garrett Collection is one of the most important scholarly resources of the Library's Near East Collections, and accounts for approximately two-thirds of what is considered the greatest Collection of its kind in North America. The Collections are housed in the Manuscripts Division of Special Collections at Firestone Library.

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