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A private, nonprofit institution, The Huntington was founded in 1919 by Henry E. Huntington. The Library’s collection of rare books and manuscripts in the fields of British and American history and literature is nothing short of extraordinary. For qualified scholars, The Huntington is one of the largest and most complete research libraries in the United States in its fields of specialization. For the general public, the Library has on display some of the finest rare books and manuscripts of Anglo-American civilization. Altogether, there are about 6 million items.

Among the treasures for research and exhibition are the Ellesmere manuscript of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, a Gutenberg Bible on vellum, the double-elephant folio edition of Audubon’s Birds of America, and a world-class collection of the early editions of Shakespeare’s works.

The Huntington also is among the nation’s most important centers for the study of the American West, with an unsurpassed collection of materials that span the full range of American western settlement, including the overland pioneer experience, the Gold Rush, and the development of Southern California.

To learn more about the Huntington, please visit their website.

Terms of use

The Huntington Library has graciously contributed the above images from their collections. Visitors may link to or download these images for personal research or non-commercial publication. As a matter of good scholarly practice and for the benefit of future researchers, we ask that researchers using reproductions of our materials give appropriate credit when quoting from or reproducing an item in the Huntington collections. Images should be captioned with information about the original source, and quotations should be footnoted. For more information about The Huntington's reproduction policy and citation guidelines, please visit their webpages.

Documents contributed by Huntington Library

1592
Arden of Faversham was first published anonymously by Edward White in 1592, and has been associated with the Shakespeare canon since the late eighteenth century.
1594
In 1594, Peter Short printed an anonymous play called The Taming of a Shrew to be sold by Cuthbert Burby.
1598
This edition of Henry IV Part 1 is the earliest printed version of the play to survive fully intact.
1599
The fifth edition of Shakespeare’s perennially popular poem Venus and Adonis appeared in 1599.
1599
William Jaggard published The Passionate Pilgrim in 1599 in two separate octavo editions. While the first edition exists only as a fragment without a title page, the second edition, shown here, carries the attribution “By W.

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