Early Books and Manuscripts

The Beinecke Library is one of the most significant sources for history in North America and contains a rich collection of materials from the classical world to the Renaissance.

  • Project makes Ottoman-Turkish manuscripts accessible to scholars

    June 26, 2023

    The manuscripts range across many genres and topics, including history, poetry, literature, mysticism, Islamic law, religious sermons, medical texts, dictionaries, and account books. They include the Vankulu Lügati (The Vankulu Dictionary), a two-volume Arabic-Turkish dictionary that in 1729 became the first printed book ever published in the Ottoman Empire, as well as a biography of Alexander the Great, and Leylā vü Mecnūn, a well-known romance in Islamic literature, akin to “Romeo and Juliet,” among many other notable works.

  • Twice as old as the Gutenberg Bible

    June 1, 2023

    Only two permanent exhibits grace the Beinecke Library’s magnificent mezzanine, which is lit by the glowing veins of enormous marble windows. To the left of the main entrance, visitors can find John James Audubon’s original Birds of North America—two massive volumes of watercolors. A small bronze case to the right housed, until recently, both volumes of Johannes Gutenberg’s 1455 Bible. Today, a single volume sits across from another important document in the history of printing: an eighth-century Buddhist text, displayed along with the wooden pagoda in which it was originally enclosed.

  • A 1,200-year-old scroll finds a home next to the Gutenberg Bible (WSHU)

    February 10, 2023

    The Gutenberg Bible is one of the treasures of Yale University’s Beinecke Library — the first book printed with movable type in Europe. Now it has a companion, a much older Japanese scroll made with an earlier form of printing, and one of the oldest known printed objects in the world. WSHU's Davis Dunavin spoke with Yale history professor Daniel Botsman, who showed him a scroll covered in tiny Japanese letters.

  • Beinecke Library unites past and present in spring exhibit (Yale Daily News)

    February 8, 2023

    On Jan. 27, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscripts Library unveiled its spring exhibit “Revisiting the Past — Imagining the Future.” Featuring artifacts spanning centuries and cultures, the exhibit is intended to add new perspectives to popular readings of history. The process for building the exhibit began about a year ago when Timothy Young, curator of modern books and manuscripts at the Beinecke, reached out to his colleagues at Sterling Memorial Library, sparking a new collaboration between the Beinecke and other collections at Yale.

  • World’s oldest printed objects to join Gutenberg Bible in Beinecke display

    January 24, 2023

    Yale’s copy of the Gutenberg Bible, on view since 1963 in a bronze case on the mezzanine of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, is a landmark in the history of the printed word. Today, another landmark of the same history, a 1,250-year-old print of Buddhist prayers — the earliest known printed text that can be reliably dated — joins it on regular display.

  • The sailor's guide

    January 1, 2023

    Medieval and early modern navigators of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea had no telescopes to help them guide their ships into port. But they had maps: specifically, portolan charts, which showed where to dock and how to avoid dangers. Portolans were used for at least 500 years. The earliest surviving portolan is the Carte Pisane, a fragment dating from the end of the thirteenth century. The Beinecke Library has a significant collection of portolan charts, dating from 1403 to 1789.

  • The world as they knew it: New Beinecke exhibition charts rise of maps

    September 1, 2022

    Yale boasts one of the most significant map collections in North America, including the continent’s largest single assemblage of portolans — navigation charts that seafarers used to find ports. Ten of the Beinecke Library’s portolans, which comprise the exhibit’s centerpiece, are displayed in the two flat cases on either side of the building’s ground floor.

  • The World in Maps, 1400-1600 (Fine Books & Collections)

    July 14, 2022

    This exhibition presents many of the most historically significant manuscript maps from the late medieval and early modern period from the Beinecke Library’s vast collection of maps. It is focused on portolan charts - large, colorful charts that showed the shoreline of the Mediterranean, and were used by sailors to navigate from port to port