About

Pictures & Conversations is an online cabinet of curiosities featuring selections from the compelling image, text, and document collections in the special collections at the Claremont Colleges Library. We hope that this blog will serve as an enjoyable way to highlight the wonderful range of collections we have and to share news about new collections. This blog is curated by staff at Honnold/Mudd Library Special Collections and Denison Library.

The Libraries special collections administer more than 170,000 volumes and 9,000 linear feet of manuscripts, papers, and files. The collections at Honnold/Mudd include historical records of The Claremont Colleges, the Philbrick Library of Theatre History, the Oxford Collection on the University and city of Oxford, the Bodman Renaissance Collection, the Irving Wallace Archive, the H. Jerry Voorhis Papers, Carruthers Aviation Collection, the Herbert Hoover Collection of Mining and Metallurgy, several large collections of Western Americana and Californiana, and Scandinavian and Baltic history. Nineteenth and twentieth century English and American literature is well represented in several author collections that contain significant manuscript holdings. Other strengths are in medieval and renaissance manuscripts, incunabula, eighteenth century English imprints, hymnology and opera, California fine printing, voyages and travels, early maps and atlases, fine art books, and local Claremont history.

Denison Library develops collections in fine printing, artists’ books, book arts, influential literary presses, literature, women’s history, children’s books, art and art history, and Scripps College history; held at Denison are papers of Ellen Browning Scripps, Gertrude Stein, May Sarton, Marianne Moore, and other important women writers and intellectuals.

Additional information about these and other materials in the special collections at The Claremont Colleges can be found at the Libraries’ website.

Materials featured on Pictures & Conversations may be protected by copyright restrictions; permission to publish should be sought from the copyright owners.

The Libraries are a unit of Claremont University Consortium, which serves the consortium of five undergraduate colleges — Pomona College, Scripps College, Claremont McKenna College, Harvey Mudd College, Pitzer College — and two graduate institutions — Claremont Graduate University, Keck Institute for Applied Life Sciences — in Claremont, California. CUC provides services shared by all students, faculty, and staff of The Claremont Colleges.