The general rare book collection consists of about 10,000 volumes covering the humanities, sciences, and social sciences. These materials are accessible through the card catalog or BobCat. The Berol collection is one of the largest collections of materials relating to Lewis Carroll. It includes books, periodicals, manuscripts, autograph letters, photographs, and ephemera. A collection of over 15,000 printed items, including periodicals, clothbound novels, and a large number of paperback series of American popular fiction of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.
Emphasis is on feminine writers.
A small manuscript file on publisher William Benners and editor Ralph Adimari is in the Fales Manuscript collection. The Fales Manuscript Collection holds over 50,000 manuscript items. It is especially strong in manuscripts by Dickens, Firbank, Gallatin, Hardy, Masefield, Meredith, Scott, Shaw, Thackeray, and H. G. Wells. The Downtown Collection is one of the largest collections of material anywhere relating to the post-1975 downtown New York arts scene. The collection contains over 6,000 printed books and 300 periodical titles.