Montreal

Note: Course guides are only available for some courses.

Coming soon!

The collection contains a variety of materials documenting French history and literature. There are a number of fragments of early French literary texts including two leaves from a copy of the "Chevalier du Cygne" dated c. 1300. There is a copy dated c. 1660 of the "Receul [sic] des actes de tous les Sinodes Nationnaux...au Royaume de France", 1559-1660.

The collection was donated to the library in 1981 by the family of the collector, the late Joe Fishstein of New York City. It is composed primarily of twentieth century Yiddish belles-lettres, poetry and criticism. While there are many standard works in the collection, there are, as well, many rare pre-World War II East European imprints. There are also scrapbooks of photographs and postcards. The collection includes some 2500 monographs and 200 serials. Most of the volumes have mac-tac bindings made by Fishstein.

The children's books collection is composed of some 3,000 volumes. While these are primarily nineteenth- and twentieth-century books, there is a small number of eighteenth-century items. The collection encompasses a wide diversity of material including alphabets, fiction, poetry, education, science, annuals, moral instruction and examples of horn books. There is a long run of variant issues and editions of the books of G.A Henty. The collection also includes some 342 Soviet children's books from the 1920s to the 1940s that are of particular interest for their graphic design.

The Rare Books Collection (now housed in Rare Books and Special Collections, McLennan-Redpath Building, 4th floor) contains many early printed books and lithographs, as well as 226 volumes of manuscripts. Among the early printed books published in Europe there are at least six dating from the 16th century, 36 titles printed in the 17th century and some 144 from the 18th century.

The 52 titles in this collection include many first and early editions of Burton's works. A number of the volumes have the bookplate of the Canadian financier Sir George Stephen, Bart (Lord Mount Stephen, 1829-1921). Other titles and editions of Burton's works are in the general rare book collection.

Records for the holdings are in the McGill Library on-line catalogue.

The Islamic manuscripts fall into three groups: Arabic, Persian and Turkish. The Arabic manuscripts, some thirty-three codices, are mostly Korans and tracts on Sufiism and Shiite sects. In addition, there is a collection of over two hundred pieces of Arabic calligraphy. There are some thirty-five Persian codices, primarily poetry, and about a hundred separate leaves, many containing miniature paintings. Among the latter is one leaf dated to the thirteenth century and a leaf from the Demotte "Shahnama", c. 1350.

The collection holds three large archives of British political papers and a number of smaller collections and single manuscripts covering the period from the late Middle Ages to the early twentieth century. Some of these materials are copies of official documents and others are private papers, and there are a number of interesting eighteenth-century collectanea containing material from earlier periods.