The first event in the history of Yale University, according to venerable tradition, was the formation of a library. Ten ministers came to the house of the Reverend Samuel Russell in Branford in 1701, each bringing books the founding of a college in this Colony. From that day the Library has been in the forefront of the minds of those most concerned with the development of the University. Thomas Clap, rector and later president of Yale College, made the first catalogue of the Library in 1742 and published it the following year. The most interesting room in the Sterling Memorial Library is a reproduction of the Yale Library of that time, equipped with contemporary furniture and prints. On the shelves in this room stand all of the books that survive (better than two thirds) in the exact order as in 1742. The Harvard Library burned to the ground in January, 1764; the William and Mary Library was destroyed by fire several times; so at Yale in this restored library you will find the oldest college library in what is now the United States, housed as it was before the American Revolution. Many of the books came to the struggling college through the efforts of the Connecticut agent in London, Jeremiah Dummer, as gifts from such people as Isaac Newton, Elihu Yale, and Isaac Watts. Bishop Berkeley, in 1733, sent about seven hundred volumes from England. From this beginning the Library and its departments have now grown to about three and one half million volumes. The scholar in the field of early American history, institutions, and culture can, therefore, expect to find at Yale all the standard works for research. In a brief article only a few of the special resources of the central library can be mentioned. The Library is exceptionally rich in the broad field of tract and pamphlet literature on early American history. The well known Henry R. Wagner Collection contains over ten thousand pamphlets of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries on British, Scottish, and Irish economics and politics. It is supm plemented by the Library's extensive general collection of similar tracts, arranged chronologically, and by an invaluable series known as College Pamphlets. The last named includes several thousand seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth century Amer-
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Jan 1, 1954
