Our rare book collection contains published works from the 1500s to the present. It features travel accounts, maps, atlases, and North Carolina imprints. Subjects covered include education; the Civil War; abolition and slavery in the US; military, naval and maritime history; and print and book history.
We also have several more specialized collections. We are building a collection of artists’ books; we also maintain the J. Edgar Hoover Collection on International Communism and the James H. and Virginia C. Schlobin Literature of the Fantastic Collection. The Hoover Collection, donated by Dr. J.C. Peele of Kinston, NC, in 1968, includes books, magazines, newspapers, pamphlets, leaflets, and other ephemera expressing pro- or anti-communist views. The Schlobin Collection, donated by Professor Robert C. Schlobin in 2004, contains science fiction and fantasy literature, as well as reference material related to these subjects.
The library catalog is where you can search for books, videos, DVD's, etc.
The catalog is the best place to look for rare books from Joyner's collections. We recommend using the advanced search options to narrow your search by collection. For rare books, try "Rare Books" or "NC Rare."
While not related to Joyner's collections, the below projects may be helpful to professors who discuss print, book or publishing history in their classes.
Rare books can be valuable to researchers because of the words they contain, but also because they are objects that provide evidence of the history of printing, binding, and reading. The resources linked below may be helpful if you are interested in studying rare books as physical objects.
