Jay T. Last sheet music collection

The Jay T. Last sheet music collection consists of approximately 34,950 scores dating from 1794 to 1998. It includes a wide range of American popular music styles, as well as scores published outside of the United States. The collection encompasses ballads, blues, comic songs, jazz, minstrel scores, military scores, patriotic melodies, pop, ragtime compositions, religious hymns, rhythm and blues hits, show tunes, soul music, and 1960s surf music. The scores comprise various editions of lyrical and instrumental compositions, some of which are ornately designed and, in some cases, bear the signatures of creators and performers. Many of the scores have sellers' marks printed on the covers. Some of the names found in the nineteenth-century series overlap with those in the twentieth-century series. It is also important to note that this collection contains historical images and language that some library users may find harmful, offensive, or inappropriate. The Jay T. Last collection is an archive of printed paper artifacts that documents American lithographic, social, and business history. The collection began in the early 1970s when physicist and Silicon Valley pioneer, Jay T. Last, moved to Southern California and started collecting citrus box labels he found at local flea markets and rummage sales. As his collection grew, Last realized that these labels conveyed important information about commercial printing, graphic design, and social history, and he expanded his collection to include other forms of American visual culture. Today, this collection contains more than 250,000 prints, posters, and ephemera of nineteenth and twentieth-century American origin and represents works by more than five hundred lithographic companies.