Although not tied directly to Penn academic programs, manuscript acquisitions are available for consultation by all Penn faculty and students. At present, manuscript and archival holdings housed in Special Collections comprise approximately 9,500 linear feet. The number of codices exceeds fifteen hundred titles, and the number of manuscript collections exceeds three hundred, with an estimate of the number of leaves in the millions. Although English-language materials predominate, we hold manuscripts in many foreign languages, including Arabic, Dutch, Flemish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Lithuanian, Persian, Portuguese, Sanskrit, Sinhalese, Spanish, Tamil, and Turkish. Codex manuscripts have traditionally been acquired for their textual significance, not for illuminations.
Most dates range from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries.
Geographically, European codices are emphasized. Additional holdings include several American bound manuscripts comprising works of literature, commercial or legal documents, and class notes from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries and music scores from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Horace Howard Furness, Sr. Guidelines for Collection Development Chronological. Materials that originate from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries currently predominate.