Library Special Collections: What We Collect

The Elmer Belt Library of Vinciana is a special collection of books and materials concerning Leonardo da Vinci and the Italian Renaissance. It was given to UCLA in 1961 by Dr. Elmer Belt, professor emeritus in the UCLA School of Medicine and a collector of Vinciana for more than sixty years.

Of special interest are those works directly related to Leonardo. These include all editions of his Treatise on Painting—the collection also contains two very rare manuscript copies of the Treatise—and facsimile editions of all his extant drawings and manuscripts. Among its other outstanding holdings are a first edition of the famous architectural treatise of Leon Batista Alberti; extremely rare volumes of the medical writings of Ambroise Pare; a superb copy of the Nuremburg Chronicle, the Divina Proportione of Luca Pacioli, which contains woodcut illustrations based on designs by Leonardo; and the very first book containing a printed mention of Leonardo, Bernardo Bellincioni's Rime of 1493.

Due to the fact that  Leonardo's interests were so diverse and his undertakings so profoundly important to subsequent developments in the arts and sciences, the scope of the collection extends far beyond his own time. The Belt Library contains more than 70 incunabula and many early documents in the history of art as well as modern studies of Renaissance and post-Renaissance culture. Holdings of materials on human and animal anatomy are complemented by those in the Special Collections for Medicine and the Sciences. Early Italian imprints are complemented by those of the Ahmanson-Murphy Reading Room.

Since Dr. Belt donated it, the collection has continued to grow, and it now encompasses more than seven thousand volumes. In addition to the continuing development of the collection on the part of the university, support has come from generous donors including Professor and Mrs. Lynn White Jr., who in 1972 gave an important collection of early books relating to Renaissance and Baroque science. Materials from the Belt collection can be paged at the Ahmanson-Murphy Reading Room in Library Special Collections.

The Libraries at UCLA have a wide variety of special collections, considered among the best in the country. After a careful search and determination that no other library of its kind existed, UCLA welcomed the opportunity to create the James O. Page Collection with these goals in mind:

• Preservation of Jim's Legacy and Works - Professional archivists catalog all relevant documents to protect them from deterioration and to ensure their availability for future generations. Individuals can visit the Library to view the documents in a safe, secure environment, or order copies of materials.
• A National EMS Library - The Collection is intended to act as a touchstone and gathering place for the papers, recordings and works of other pioneers and leaders.
• Online Availability - The works of Jim and others, along with interviews, videos, letters and other documents and will eventually be available online at the Collection's website. It will be a treasure trove of original scripts, speeches, articles, and letters that document the history and culture of EMS.
• Voices for Tomorrow - The Collection will gather existing and new interviews with EMS luminaries and other pioneers, ensuring their voices and stories will be saved for generations to come.

Please visit the James O. Page Collection Research Guide.

(Left to Right: Robert Vosper, James Davis, Norman Powell)

View the online exhibit: The Michael Sadleir Collection of 19th Century Fiction.

In the year 2000, the UCLA Library celebrated the 50^th anniversary of the Department of Special Collections located in the basement of the Charles E. Young Research Library. This year also marked the 49^th anniversary of the library’s acquisition of the Michael Sadleir Collection of fiction published between the 1790s and the turn of the twentieth century. In addition, 2000 marked the 55th anniversary of the founding of the journal, Nineteenth-Century Literature (originally called The Trollopian) by Bradford Booth, of the UCLA English Department. Dr. Thomas Wortham and Dr. Joseph Bristow, both of the UCLA English Department, organized a conference in celebration of the Sadleir Collection, the journal, and the study of nineteenth-century fiction in February 2000.

Rare Book Librarian James Davis from Special Collections inspired Suzanne Tatian, Miriam Dudley (Librarian retired), and Claire Bellanti of the UCLA Libraries to organize as a companion to the conference, an exhibition of the Sadleir Collection, which was mounted from January through March of 2000.

Ellen Truxaw, PhD candidate in English and former scholar in the Center for Primary Research and Training led a Flickr tag-a-thon to highlight “yellowback” novels from LSC’s Michael Sadleir Collection of 19^th Century Fiction. Sadleir was a British book collector who amassed an extensive collection of 19^th century British literature during his lifetime. The collection includes over a thousand “yellowbacks,” popular novels from the Victorian era, most of which have covers with rich color illustrations laid over a yellow background.

Ellen worked in the CFPRT with two undergraduate students, Gloria Zhang and Angela Kim, to digitize and create metadata that describes the novels and their cover art. Ellen also conducted in-depth research to provide detailed description of the novels' contents and convey their historical significance in the Victorian era. The team posted the images and their descriptions to Flickr in order to promote wider public discovery. They have completed the digitization and description of over 1,000 books!

On October 27, 2015, Ellen led a group tag-a-thon of the digitized "yellowback" covers. In the 90 minutes of active tagging, the Flickr site received approximately 49,527 views of the digitized images and all images now have at least a couple of tags each. There are 2,173 digitized covers online, of which approximately 1,100 are from the Sadleir Collection in UCLA Library Special Collections (the rest are part of Emory University’s holdings). You can see the full Flickr collection here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/yellowbacks/

Special thanks to English professor Dr. Jonathan Grossman for conceiving of and spearheading this project!