William L. Clements Library

The Book Division contains approximately 80,000 books, pamphlets, broadsides, and periodicals.[10] Highlights of the collection include books on the discovery and exploration of North America, colonial American imprints, and books and pamphlets of the American Revolution. Expanding beyond the areas of William L. Clements’ personal collection, the library also holds books on a variety of subjects such as African American history, education, Native American history, politics, religion, sermons and orations, slavery and anti-slavery, the West Indies, and women's history. The contributions of other collectors, such as the James V. Medler Crime Collection[11] and James S. Schoff Civil War Collection,[12] provide additional subject strengths on certain topics.

The Manuscripts Division cares for approximately 2,600 collections of letters, documents, diaries, financial records, and other materials, with an emphasis on 18th- and 19th-century North America. The division's strengths include Revolutionary War era British-American colonial and military history; the Civil War; 19th-century social and religious reform movements, especially abolition; African American and Native American history; women's history; education; naval and maritime history; health and medicine; travel; business and commerce; and other topics.[13]

William L. Clements began to collect manuscripts in the early 1920s and, with the library's first director Randolph Adams, acquired many of the cornerstone collections of the manuscripts division, including the papers of British Prime Minister William Petty, 2nd Earl of Shelburne; commanders-in-chief of the Army in North America Thomas Gage and Henry Clinton; abolitionists Angelina Grimké, Sarah Grimké, and Theodore Weld; and others.

The map collection has been assembled to document the expansion of geographical knowledge of the Americas from the 15th through the 19th centuries, with particular emphasis on North American military history, frontier expansion, and the history of cartography itself. The Map Division was established to deal with the numerous maps and plans acquired by Mr. Clements in the 1920s, some with important manuscript collections and others through the purchase of existing map and atlas collections, notably that of Henry Vignaud (1830–1922).[14]

The Map Division holds some 30,000 maps and plans, about 1,500 of which are manuscripts. Many of the latter came to the library with manuscript collections such as the Gage and Clinton papers, which makes the holdings particularly rich in the cartography of the American Revolution. In addition to separate maps, the Clements holds 600 atlases. The map catalog includes all maps in books and atlases.[15]

The Graphics Division holds prints, photographs, printed ephemera, original artwork, illustrated and non-illustrated sheet music, and realia.

William L. Clements had a modest collection of portrait prints and a few Revolutionary War cartoons when he founded the library in the 1920s but he showed little interest in visual materials. The current Graphics Division, founded in 2002, is made up mostly of materials acquired over the past 30 years. For sheer numbers, the fastest growing part of the Clements Library has been the photograph collection, with fewer than 100 items in the 1970s, and over 150,000 by 2015.

The subjects represented by the division mirror the subjects of the other Clements divisions with strengths in American military history, political and social histories, American urban and landscape views, portraiture, satire, popular culture, leisure activities, labor, technology, travel, and culinary history. Examples of almost every printing and photographic process used from the 15th to the 20th centuries exists within the collections.

The library has recently acquired the David V. Tinder Collection of Michigan Photography, representing over 100,000 photographs taken from ca. 1845 -1980 in the state.

Approximate numbers for the division holdings:

• Prints—9400 items
• Photos—150,000[16]
• Ephemera—10,000
• Sheet music—15,000
• Artwork—150
• Realia – 100