When I first visited IU’s Bloomington campus during my senior year in high school, only a select few landmarks stuck in my head: the beautiful naked lady statue in the circle drive and the countless beautiful non-naked college girls walking around. My tour guide took us to the Wells library and when he mentioned all the others around campus, I didn’t even blink. Little did I know, the renowned Lilly Library is less like a traditional library and more like your rich uncle’s personal collection of cool stuff.
Boasting one of the most expansive rare book and manuscript collections in the nation, the Lilly Library now contains roughly 400,000 rare books, 6.5 million manuscripts and 100,000 pieces of sheet music. It’s amazing to think the library found its roots in 1960 when J.K. Lilly, owner of Lilly Pharmaceuticals in Indianapolis, donated his personal collection. Think of
him as your rich uncle.
Currently, the permanent holdings include American, British and Latin American relics on literature regarding science, medicine, food and music. There’s also a substantial collection of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts in the Lilly Library.
Notable items in the library's collections include:
- The New Testament of the Gutenberg Bible
- The first printed collection of Shakespeare's works
- Audubon's Birds of America
- One of 25 extant copies of the "First Printing of the Declaration of Independence" (also known as the "Dunlap Broadside") that was printed in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776
- George Washington's letter accepting the presidency of the United States
- Abraham Lincoln's desk from his law office
- Lord Chesterfield's letters to his son
- Manuscripts of Robert Burns's "Auld Lang Syne"
- J. M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World
- J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan
- Typescripts of many of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels
- Recent acquisition of 30,000 mechanical puzzles from Jerry Slocum.
Other notables include papers from directors Orson Welles and John Ford, poets Sylvia Plath and Ezra Pound, and authors Edith Wharton and Upton Sinclair.
For more information on The Lilly Library, check out the
site.
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