Rare Books Division : History

The Department of Special Collections came into existence during the early 1930's. During the first forty years of the University's existence, gifts and purchases of rare books and manuscripts had been shelved among the regular collections and in the Director's Office. In 1933, the library's scattered special collections, some 5,000 volumes, were placed in a seminar room on the top floor of the main library (now the Bing Wing of the Green Library Complex). This room was at this point named the Rare Book Room. The first librarian for the rare book and manuscript collections was hired in 1938, and some years later the room was renamed for Albert M. Bender, the San Francisco bibliophile whose philanthropy had long benefited the Stanford rare book collections.

One of the first collections to be housed in Special Collections was the Felton Library, a collection of ninteenth- and twentieth-century English and American literature, given as a gift in 1929 by Kate Felton Elkins in memory of her mother Charlotte Ashley Felton, to whom it had belonged. As an addition to this collection, Kate Felton Elkins donated the D.H. Lawrence collection in 1933, which includes correspondence, manuscript poems, and typescripts primarily for the period between 1915 and 1929.

In 1937, the Elmer E. Robinson Collection of American History and Government was established in the Rare Book Room. This collection included, in addition to its 1,500 volumes, some correspondence and a "small but fine" group of portraits, prints, and photographs.

By the end of World War II, despite years of fiscal hardship created first by the Depression and then by World War II, Stanford University Libraries holdings had grown in size, some 1,221,826 volumes, to the point where it was ranked in the top 10 of university libraries in the United States; however, nearly two-thirds of the book purchasing budget was allocated to four libraries: Law, Medicine, Business, and the Hoover Library (later Institute) on War, Revolution and Peace. Growth in the holdings of all other departments and subjects was dependent primarily on gifts from donors.