Rare materialsin the world

This collection contains rare, valuable, and important works held in the Thomas J. Watson Library and other curatorial department libraries at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Seventy exhibition catalogs published between 1920 and 1936, when the Kraushaar Gallery was located at 680 Fifth Avenue in New York City.

Over 450 exhibition checklists and pamphlets from 1895-1953, held by the Thomas J. Watson Library and the Frick Art Reference Library.

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Scrapbooks of newspaper obituaries of American and European artists, 1906-1929, compiled by Met curator Arthur D’Hervilly and other Museum staff.

Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century publications and ephemera from the various early iterations of Tiffany and Company.

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898 catalogs and checklists published by Knoedler between 1869 and 1946, comprising almost fourteen thousand pages of content.

Rare Books in The Robert Goldwater Library Titles that reflect the subject matter and wide geographical breadth of Goldwater Library's collection and the curatorial department it serves, The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing.

Rare monographs, auction catalogs, museum collection catalogs and archaeological treatises on Egyptian and classical antiquities.

At top: Photograph [5], Agra Fort and Taj Mahal (detail), from [An album of photographs of Indian architecture, views and people], 19th century.

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Early Pictorialism exhibition catalogs, checklists and announcements from the Intimate Gallery and An American Place, and several early manuals and trade catalogs on photography.

Primarily from nineteenth- and early-twentieth century Russia or the Ukraine, this collection includes a wide array of themes and formats.

Twelve issues of this seminal mid-nineteenth century British journal of “art, literature, decoration and the accomplishments” illustrated with original chromolithographic prints.

Titles that reflect the subject matter and wide geographical breadth of Goldwater Library's collection and the curatorial department it serves, The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing.

A complete set of all known publications produced by The Museum of Primitive Art from its founding in 1957 to its closing in 1974.

The Paper Legacy Project documents the work and histories of prominent professional American decorative paper artists active from the late 1960s to the present.

Gifts from J. Pierpont Morgan, Samuel Putnam Avery, and other founders and early trustees of the Museum established the foundation of the Libraries' rare book collections. Generous donors provide funding for the continuing growth of this already strong collection of treatises on art and architecture, early travel books, archaeological studies, rare collection catalogs, early trade catalogs, artists’ manuals and handbooks, complete runs of seminal journals, fencing books, scrapbooks, fine bindings, and examples of fine printing.