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Robert H. Taylor Collection

Placed on deposit in the Princeton University Library in 1972, and received as a bequest in 1985, the Robert H. Taylor Collection consists of over 4,000 rare books and 3,300 manuscripts illustrating the scope of English literature from the fourteenth century to the 1920's. The collection began about 1930 and progressed to its present form in several distinct stages. It was moved to Princeton in 1960 and housed in the former Princetoniana Room in Firestone Library in 1972. 

  • For more details about the holdings of the Robert H. Taylor Collection:

    See the double issue of the Princeton University Library Chronicle devoted in its entirety to a survey of the Taylor Collection: Robert J. Wickenheiser, "The Robert H. Taylor Collection" (Vol. XXXVIII, no. 2 and 3; Winter-Spring, 1976-77) [full text], carries 13 articles by such scholars as G.E. Bentley, James Thorpe, Mary Hyde, Charles Ryskamp, E.D.H. Johnson, H. W. Liebert, Richard M. Ludwig, John V. Fleming, Earl Miner, and Thomas P. Roche.  Also, the entire Winter, 1986 issue of the Princeton University Library Chronicle focuses on the Robert H. Taylor Collection [full text available?].

    See also: Robert H. Taylor, "Contemporary Collectors III: The Robert H. Taylor Library" in the Book Collector Vol. 3, no. 4 (Winter, l954); "Association Copies from the Collection of Robert H. Taylor" in the Gazette of the Grolier Club [New series], (June, l969), no. 10; and A.D. Wainwright, "Robert H. Taylor" in the Gazette of the Grolier Club [New series], (1986), no. 38.

    Robert Milevski's work on 19th century signed bindings in the collection is available here.

     Added to the collection are several important books bought from Mr. John Brett-Smith in 1986 that once belonged to Narcissus Luttrell and have his notes regarding publication.

  • The collection consists of manuscripts, letters, and documents of numerous and varied authors and artists that span nearly five centuries of English and American literature. There is a variety of related material, such as such as artwork, illustrated albums, letterbooks, and photographs.

    Authors most extensively represented include the so-called "Taylor authors"-Max Beerbohm (with numerous caricatures and drawings, correspondence and manuscripts), Alexander Pope, Richard Brinsley Sheridan; George Gordon Byron, and Anthony Trollope.

    Other writers significantly represented in the collection, with regard to manuscripts and/or letters, are: the Brontë family (Anne, Charlotte, and Patrick), Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Benjamin Robert Haydon, Henry James, George Bernard Shaw, Lytton Strachey, Alfred Tennyson, William Makepeace Thackeray, the Trollope family (Frances Milton, Henry Merivale, T. Adolphus, and Frances Eleanor), Oscar Wilde, and Virginia Woolf. The major artists include William Blake, Hablot Knight Browne ("Phiz"), George Cruikshank, Edward Lear, John Everett Millais, William Makepeace Thackeray, and J. M. W. Turner.

    Note: A listing of Taylor Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts (Series 4) is included as a reference for researchers, but full textual and codicological descriptions of them will eventually be published in a "Catalogue of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Princeton University Library."

Related Publications

The Princeton University Library Chronicle - Volume 38, Issues 2 and 3

Issue devoted to the Robert H. Taylor Collection.  Guest editor: Robert J. Wickenheiser

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Additional Research Guides

  • Checklist of Western Medieval, Byzantine, and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Princeton University
  • Survey of the Taylor Collection: Robert J. Wickenheiser, "The Robert H. Taylor Collection" (Princeton University Library Chronicle)

    See the double issue of the Princeton University Library Chronicle devoted in its entirety to a survey of the Taylor Collection: Robert J. Wickenheiser, "The Robert H. Taylor Collection" (Vol. XXXVIII, no. 2 and 3; Winter-Spring, 1976-77), carries 13 articles by such scholars as G.E. Bentley, James Thorpe, Mary Hyde, Charles Ryskamp, E.D.H. Johnson, H. W. Liebert, Richard M. Ludwig, John V. Fleming, Earl Miner, and Thomas P. Roche. Also, the entire Winter, 1986 issue of the Princeton University Library Chronicle focuses on the Robert H. Taylor Collection.