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 more than 11 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

Elizabeth Montagu and the Bluestocking Corpus Online

Etching of women fighting, knocking drinks, tables, and each other to the ground.

The Huntington conference “Correspondence and Embodiment: The Bluestocking Corpus Online,” organized in collaboration with the Elizabeth Montagu Correspondence Online project, will investigate new questions deriving from the recent digitization of The Huntington’s Elizabeth Montagu Papers.

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How #MeToo Played Out in 19th-Century California

Text from an 1890 Superior Court complaint document.

The extensive Los Angeles Area Court Records offer researchers invaluable evidence of everyday contestations over sexuality and gender relations in early California, the blurring of lines between sexual consent and coercion, and abuses of women whose economic survival was at stake.

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William Camargo’s Protest Pictures Give Voice to History

Three people stand over a table observing a series of photo prints.

Photographer William Camargo has a talent for transporting the viewer to a precise moment in time, often delivering a jarring history lesson in the process. His series Origins and Displacements amplifies issues of gentrification and the invisible labor in his hometown of Anaheim, California.

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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.

Learn More

Highlights from the Collections

Programs and Stories

  • 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
    Event
    Paintings, Peepshows, and Porcupines: Exhibitions in London, 1775–1851
    Sept. 22, 2023–Sept. 23, 2023
    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
    Read more
  • The cover of a diary, partially torn, with cursive writing.
    Verso
    An American in London on the Eve of Revolution
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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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