John Hay Library

Opened in 1911, the John Hay Library is the largest and most diverse special collections library in Rhode Island. Holding approximately 400,000 books and more than 10 million manuscripts, as well as hundreds of thousands of broadsides, maps, prints, photographs, and pieces of sheet music, the John Hay Library is especially strong in a number of areas, including American poetry and plays, military history, Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, Rhode Island history, the history of science and medicine, the history of magic and the occult, the history of dance, gay and lesbian fiction, the literature of wit and humor, extremist and dissenting literature, alcohol and addiction studies, and the book arts. The Brown University Archives, housed in the library, contains the records of the institution from its founding in 1764.