Special Exhibitions

Future, current, and past special exhibitions are listed below. Public visitors are welcome in the Beinecke Library exhibition hall on Monday and Tuesday, 9am – 7pm; Wednesday, 10am – 7pm; Thursday, 9am – 7pm; Friday, 9am – 5pm; and Saturday and Sunday, noon – 5pm.

The special exhibitions can be enjoyed on a self-guided basis. Please check the Hours and Accessibility page on this website for detailed information, including current health and safety guidelines.

There are typically two sets of special exhibitions a year, on view generally from mid-January to early July and mid-July to early January. These exhibitions showcase collections materials using the flat cases on the ground floor and the curved cases and vitrines on the mezzanine. Detailed information on each special exhibition’s topics, themes, and contents, as well as specific opening and closing dates, can be read in the individual listings below.

  • Permanent Markers: Aspects of the History of Printing

    How did printing help define the modern world? Techniques from eighth-century Japan to Gutenberg, lithography to xerox, printing on ceramic, silk, and metal...

  • The Stolen Texts of Molière

    This exhibition examines how seventeeth-century publishers pirated, plagiarized, and mis-appropriated Molière’s plays. Drawing on the Walter L...

  • Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass at 150

    Celebrating the first publication of Leaves of Grass in 1855, the exhibition includes copies of the rare 1855 edition of this ground breaking work, as well as...

  • A Book of Her Own

    Books tell us many things beyond what their authors write in them. Single copies of books, for instance, often reveal their particular history­-who owned them...

  • Friedrich Schiller

    To mark the 200th anniversary of Schiller’s death, the library presented an exhibition that included first editions of Schiller’s works, musical...

  • Don Quixote in Beinecke Library

    This exhibition showed the profound impact that this truly novel novel had on world literature, drama, and the public imagination. On display were first...