A white building with numerous pillars and a spanish tile roof with a green lawn in front.

Library

The Huntington Library is one of the world’s great independent research libraries, with some 12 million items spanning the 11th to the 21st century.

Every year, researchers from over 30 countries make more than 20,000 visits to the Library’s reading rooms, and thousands more remote researchers make use of the Library’s virtual services and digital collections. Some 75 Library staff members play a critical role in cultivating and expanding access to the collections, creating new opportunities for discovery and engagement, and ensuring that collections are preserved for the future.

Library News

Photography’s Long Infatuation with Botany

A cluster of multicolored flowers with petals that are green in the center, then yellow, pink, and magenta.

Thanks to digital technology, it’s possible for anyone with a smartphone to create galleries of captivating plant images in an afternoon. But this is just the latest chapter in a long love affair between photographers and plants—many examples of which are documented in The Huntington’s collections.

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Proclaiming Independence

A tan paper with a title in large font that reads, “In Congress, July 4, 1776, a declaration by the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress assembled.”

In July 1776, the Second Continental Congress considered it imperative that the official text of the Declaration of Independence be disseminated as quickly and widely as possible.

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Joseph Hansen, Detective Novelist and LGBTQ+ Activist

Black-and-white photo of person typing with cigarette in mouth.

Joseph Hansen, whose novels chronicle significant shifts in gay life between 1970 and the early 1990s, is best known for his series featuring the openly and unapologetically gay private investigator Dave Brandstetter.

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Library Collections

All Collections
People sit at tables doing research in the Ahmanson Reading Room

Using the Library

Every year, researchers from over 30 countries make more than 20,000 visits to the Library’s reading rooms, and thousands more make use of the Library’s virtual services and digital collections.

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Highlights from the Collections

Programs and Stories

  • A waterfall cuts through a crevice in a tall mountain range, disappearing behind a forest of trees.
    Verso
    Another West: Ecologies of Photography
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  • Text reads "Finding Judith", over a blurry background image of a map.
    Videos and Recorded Programs
    Hdoc: Finding Judith
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  • A greeting card illustration of a butterfly on a plant with berries and flowers.
    Verso
    Greetings from The Huntington’s Archives
    Read more
  • Two printed images, on the left of a Chinese still life, on the right a book cover.
    Videos and Recorded Programs
    Hdoc: Books of Pictures & Pictures of Books
    Read more
  • A person with short hair poses in a black tank-top with hand lifted to their chin.
    Verso
    Queering the Collections: A Tale of Two Libraries
    Read more
  • Etching of women fighting, knocking drinks, tables, and each other to the ground.
    Verso
    Elizabeth Montagu and the Bluestocking Corpus Online
    Read more
  • Portrait of a woman wearing a coral necklace, sitting next to red drapes with gold tassels.
    Frontiers
    Coral Lives: Literature, Labor, and the Making of America
    Read more
  • Text from an 1890 Superior Court complaint document.
    Verso
    How #MeToo Played Out in 19th-Century California
    Read more
  • A painting of a man sitting under a tree canopy with a canoe on the shore next to him.
    Verso
    Rethinking Maritime History from Below
    Read more
  • Leigh Family Papers, unpublished letters and manuscripts from Jane Austen's mother's family, 1686–1823, 1866.
    Videos and Recorded Programs
    Family Archivists: Letters from Jane Austen’s Mom
    Read more
  • Illustration of 1800s museum exhibition
    Verso
    Paintings, Peepshows, and Porcupines: Exhibitions in London
    Read more
  • Chinese text
    Videos and Recorded Programs
    A Thousand Years of Books: Printed in 1085
    Read more
  • A framed black and white photo of a woman and young girl.
    Videos and Recorded Programs
    Multi-Storied Library: Positively One of a Kind - The Creation and Care of Daguerreotypes
    Read more
  • An 18th-century portrait of a French nobleman dressed in an ornate brown coat with gold braids, trim, and beads and white silk lining. A blue sash is draped underneath the open coat.
    Verso
    Portraiture and Colonial Plunder
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rare book opened to page of world map

About the Library

  • One of the world’s largest collections of British medieval manuscripts, including the 15th-century Ellesmere manuscript of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
  • One of 12 surviving copies on vellum of the Gutenberg Bible, the jewel of the second-largest collection of incunabula (15th-century printed books) in the United States.
  • A leading repository for Americana, including extensive holdings for Lincoln, Washington, and Jefferson, and such gems as the original manuscript of Franklin’s autobiography.
  • Extensive collections on the American West, including the great 19th-century photographic surveys and original sources about overland migration, industry and transport, and Native Americans.
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