By the Numbers
The Library currently holds approximately 133,976 print titles, 201, 134 volumes and over 2,200 collections measuring over 21,815 linear feet of material (that’s over 4 miles worth of boxes). We welcome approximately 1,000 researchers each year (about 50 percent from outside Emory’s classes, and 30 percent Emory undergraduates) and another 800 college and K-12 students for classes and instruction sessions. Beginning in May 2014, the Rose Library underwent a major renovation to its public spaces on the 10th Floor of the Woodruff Library. The library gained 13,966 square feet of assignable space, including 4,300 ft2 in the balcony, 2,102 ft2 in the expanded reading room, and 1,206 ft2 in new classroom space. The library’s oldest collections include ancient cuneiform tablets on permanent loan from the Carlos Museum and a Greek manuscript fragment dating from the 4th century CE. The oldest printed book, Biblia Latina, is from 1475. Emory University Archives includes a land plat from 1825 (ten years prior to the donation of the land and founding of the University) and 180 linear feet of alumni records dating back to the 1920s. The Billops-Hatch Collection features thousands of rare and out-of-print books, periodicals, posters, and pamphlets on all aspects of African American history and culture; interviews with more than 1,200 writers, artists, poets and other cultural figures; and scripts of more than 1,000 African American-authored plays. The Raymond Danowski Poetry Library includes 75,000 volumes, 50,000 journals, thousands of broadsides, countercultural material, manuscripts, recordings, and objects, The collection gathers every book of poetry in English published during the long twentieth century, including a rare first edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855) and one of twenty-five true first-edition copies of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956). Literary and Poetry Collections include the papers of Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, British Poets Laureate Ted Hughes and Carol Ann Duffy, Booker Prize-winner Salman Rushdie, iconic Southern writers Flannery O’Connor and Pulitzer Prize-winner Alice Walker, and Poet Laureate of the United States Natasha Trethewey. The Rose Library’s Political, Cultural and Social Movements Collections document the history, culture and politics of the American South. These collections explore the political activism and social reform of the women’s, Civil Rights, and LGBT movements.