Harry Ransom CenterThe University of Texas at Austin

The Carl H. Pforzheimer Library

Illustration from John Heywood's The Spider and the Flie,
1556

The Pforzheimer Library of Early English Literature, was purchased in 1986. The Pforzheimer Library of Shelley and the Romantics is located at the New York Public Library.

The UT Library Catalog has records for all 1100 books in the collection; they are also exhaustively described in the printed catalog of the collection: The Carl H. Pforzheimer Library (New York, 1940), reprinted by Oak Knoll Press in 1997. Briefer records of the books are to be found in the English Short Title Catalogue database.

The works in the Library are the finest examples of the plays, poems, novels, essays, polemical writings, and translations of the best, most influential, and most representative English writers of the period 1475 to 1700. All major writers (Shakespeare, Milton, Marvell, Donne, Congreve, Marlowe, and Bacon, for example) are available in first and important editions. The Milton holdings are enhanced by a copy of Comus with the author's manuscript annotations. The Shakespeare plays and poems include several quarto editions of plays and all four of the folio editions of his works; and the Marlowe books include great rarities.