Library Collections

Figure and horses on California coastline

The Huntington Library is one of the world’s great independent research libraries, with some 12 million items spanning the 11th to the 21st century.

New acquisitions build on existing curatorial areas and establish new areas of inquiry. These extraordinary and diverse materials are centered on 14 intersecting collection strengths.

A busy tinted historical photo of cowboys on horses.

American History

The Library is home to hundreds of archival collections and over 200,000 single manuscripts, books, prints, photographs, and ephemera documenting the history of what is now the Northeast, Midwest, and South of the United States, as well as the Atlantic and Central regions of Canada, from the Colonial era through the end of World War II.

An architectural drawing from the 1920s.

Architecture

The Huntington’s principal architecture and planning holdings relate to Southern California. As the result of focused collecting activity from the late 1970s on, the Library now holds approximately 35,000 plans, renderings, photographs, and project records from around 1900 through the 1950s.