Princeton’s Modern and Contemporary Collections consist of rare books and manuscript materials documenting national and international literary production from the 19th and 20th centuries, onward. In addition to rare books and archival manuscripts, a number of other formats, such as born-digital material, digital photograph, and audio-visual material, are also represented in this diverse and varied collection. 

Our rare book collection contains approximately 175,000 items, including many first or early editions, some in exceptionally rare dust jackets and bearing unique identifying markers such as authors’ signatures, annotations, and personalized inscriptions. Notably, some of these items bear the markings of the Bloomsbury Group, Harlem Renaissance authors, and writers and poets from the Lost Generation.

Princeton’s contemporary manuscript holdings contain an extensive collection of archives, correspondence, manuscripts, and other materials by British, American, Latin American, and Caribbean authors and intellectuals. Significant collections include the papers of Toni Morrison, Sylvia Beach, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda Fitzgerald, Stanley Kunitz, Carl Van Doren, Alejandra Pizarnik, Ricardo Piglia, Mario Vergas Llosa, among many others. In addition, we have a particular strength in the American publishing archives, which includes expansive holdings of author files of correspondence and related materials, chiefly 19th- and 20th-century, from renowned publishers such as Charles Scribner's Sons, Sylvia Beach, and Harper & Brothers.