Selected Special Collections

Oliver Wendell Holmes Library

Book and print collection of the Holmes family

The book and print collection of Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841-1935), received through his bequest in 1935, represents the combined libraries of several generations of the Holmes family. In addition to the hundreds of works on jurisprudence, constitutional law, philosophy, history, economics, political science, education, oriental art,science and bibliography assembled by Justice Holmes, the collection contains the books of Holmes' great-grandfather , Judge Charles Jackson; and his paternal grandfather, the Rev. Abiel Holmes, an early collector of Americana. Possibly the most outstanding feature, however, is the American literature collected by Justice Holmes' father, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894), author of The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. Noteworthy re presentation volumes inscribed by James Russell Lowell, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Ralph Waldo Emerson and rare nineteenth century publications, such as Illustrations of the Athenaeum Gallery of Paintings (1830) and the New York edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1886) bound with sheets of the suppressed English edition of the previous year. Approximately seven hundred volumes are in this collection.