The English Collection includes first and special editions of English literature, history and many other topics, from the 16th to the 20th centuries. Fifteenth-century books are held in the Incunabula Collection.
Among the writers well represented are Milton, Spenser, Donne, Dryden, Pope, Defoe, Sterne, Johnson, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, the Brownings, Morris, Swinburne, Bridges, Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontes, Eliot, and many others.
More about the Milton Collection
Further editions and supporting literature are held in the Alexander Turnbull Library General Collection.
Access items in this collection
This collection is currently unavailable, and can be accessed again at Molesworth Street from August 6, 2012.
A growing number of items in the collection are listed on the National Library Catalogue.
Other forms of access include:
- Card catalogue - provides access to items catalogued before 1963.
- Microfiche catalogue - provides partial access up to 1984.
-
Printed sources - Early imprints in New Zealand libraries: a finding list of books printed before 1801 held in libraries in the Wellington region, 1995; A descriptive catalogue of the Milton collection in the Alexander Turnbull Library by Kathleen Coleridge, 1980.
Contact details, and information about accessing, borrowing, and making copies from this Collection
Image
'Seleucides Nigricans (Shaw). Twelve-wired bird of paradise' .Hand-coloured lithograph in vol. 1 of R. Bowdler Sharpe, Monograph of the Paradiseidae or birds of paradise, and Ptilonorhynchidae, of bower-birds (London: Henry Sotheran & Co, 1891-1898).
