Early Books and Manuscripts

The Beinecke Library is one of the most significant sources for history in North America and contains a rich collection of materials from the classical world to the Renaissance.

  • Beinecke Library hires six curators

    September 26, 2024

    The Beinecke Library has hired a cohort of six new curators—more than half of its curatorial team—who will shape how Yale Library special collections are selected, taught, and used for decades to come.

  • An Intoxicating 500-Year-Old Mystery (The Atlantic)

    August 8, 2024

    Lisa Fagin Davis was starting her medieval-studies Ph.D. at Yale in 1989 when she got a part-time job at the university’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Her boss was the curator of early books and manuscripts, and he stuck her with an unenviable duty: answering letters from the cranks, conspiracists, and truthers who hounded the library with questions about its most popular holding.

  • Turning the Page

    February 5, 2024

    The Gutenberg Bible has been on display in a large bronze and glass case at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library since 1963. At almost 600 years old, its typeface and illustrations are still vibrant, and the pages remain flexible, in no small part, because of the consistent care the Bible receives from Yale Library conservators.

  • In the cards: Library partners work together to solve mysteries of rare tarot deck

    October 4, 2023

    Although in some circles tarot cards are divination tools for predicting the future, the tarot cards in the library’s collection are opening windows into the past. For the past five years, and throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the library has collaborated internally and partnered internationally to study the world’s three earliest 15th-century Italian tarot (or tarocchi) decks. One of these decks is the Visconti di Modrone deck, held in the Cary Collection of Playing Cards at Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Dating from ca. 1440–45, it is one of the oldest of the three.

  • Project makes Ottoman-Turkish manuscripts accessible to scholars

    June 26, 2023

    The manuscripts range across many genres and topics, including history, poetry, literature, mysticism, Islamic law, religious sermons, medical texts, dictionaries, and account books. They include the Vankulu Lügati (The Vankulu Dictionary), a two-volume Arabic-Turkish dictionary that in 1729 became the first printed book ever published in the Ottoman Empire, as well as a biography of Alexander the Great, and Leylā vü Mecnūn, a well-known romance in Islamic literature, akin to “Romeo and Juliet,” among many other notable works.

  • Twice as old as the Gutenberg Bible

    June 1, 2023

    Only two permanent exhibits grace the Beinecke Library’s magnificent mezzanine, which is lit by the glowing veins of enormous marble windows. To the left of the main entrance, visitors can find John James Audubon’s original Birds of North America—two massive volumes of watercolors. A small bronze case to the right housed, until recently, both volumes of Johannes Gutenberg’s 1455 Bible. Today, a single volume sits across from another important document in the history of printing: an eighth-century Buddhist text, displayed along with the wooden pagoda in which it was originally enclosed.