The Graphic Arts Collection began in 1940, when Elmer Adler brought his collection of 8,000 books and 4,000 prints to Princeton for an experiment in the study and teaching of graphic arts. Today the collection holds closer to 60,000 prints, drawings, photographs, paintings, sculpture, and printed ephemera along with an international book collection specializing in fine press, artists’ books, and illustrated editions. Research collections support the study of paper and papermaking, printing, printmaking, typography, and book design. A world-class reference collection holds over 600 volumes on all aspects of printing and print making. Caricature and Satire Thanks to alumni donations, we hold comprehensive collections of prints, drawings, and illustrated editions by William Hogarth, Thomas Rowlandson, James Gillray, George Cruikshank, Honoré Daumier, Thomas Nast, Whitney Darrow Jr., Henry Martin, and many others from the 18th century to the present. Death Masks The Laurence Hutton collection of life and death masks is the largest of its kind in this country. The collection includes actors, politicians, writers (such as Walt Whitman, John Keats, Jonathan Swift, William Wordsworth), and other celebrated figures. Optical Devices Beginning with the camera obscura and camera lucida, this collection includes over 50 examples of rare pre-cinema devices together with the prints and photographs made for their use including a megalethoscope, zograscope, zoetrope, praxinoscope, and more. Examples of transformation prints, panoramas, myriopticons, and other optical toys are also collected.
