Fonds consists of two binders compiled by Dr. Henry H. Crapo when he was a Trustee with the Wasemquia Charitable Trust. The binders document the Vestris Prize Competition for Choreography in 1967 and 1968, which the Wasemquia Charitable Trust helped to sponsor. Fonds documents scheduling and planning for the competition, as well as lists of competitors and judges.

Correspondence addressed to and from Henry Crapo, discussing various topics such as invitations sent to renowned ballet dancers in the New York world to judge in the competition are included, along with press releases and letters to advertisement agencies to promote the competition. Other records in the binders include clippings from newspaper and magazines advertising the competition, as well as black and white photographs depicting trophies from the competitions and scenes of performance entries.

Fonds also includes a yellow patina bronze statue that depicts a caricature of Auguste Vestris, which acted as the central theme for the Vestris Prize competition. The statue portrays Auguste Vestris with an oversized head, wings, and a garland.

Fonds consists of two holograph letters from John Keble addressed to Henry Thomas Ellacombe [?]. The fonds also includes one photograph of Mr. and Mrs. Keble.

Contains one letter from Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington addressed to Francis Fane, the 12th Earl of Westmorland.

Manuscript poem that was found in "Poems: Songs and Sonnets" by Hartley Coleridge (1796-1849). The poem is written in an unknown hand and the title reads "Lines (unpublished) written to a friend after a discussion on [points] of faith - by Hartley Coleridge."

Southey's version of nursery rhyme, presented as a holograph poem in a letter to his brother, Captain Thomas Southey, St. Helen's, Auckland, New Zealand. Signed with Southey's initials.

Consists of biographical information, two audio reels entitled "Between Ourselves", correspondence regarding purchase of same, and one autographed photograph.

Large quantity of maps, drawings etc., largely unlisted at this time.

Collection consists of three manuscript German prayer books dating from 1783 to the late 19th century. Each book contains a series of prayers such as communion, confession, morning, and evening prayers, in addition to examples of Fraktur (folk) art in ink and watercolour.

Collection consists of 169 19th century American photographs. Included are 115 carte-de-visites, 40 cabinet portraits, 2 albums, 11 miscellaneous photographs and 1 envelope of miscellaneous business and greeting cards.

The photographs vary in size, but many of are 1 x 1 cm and mounted on card. Most are albumen type photographs depicting various people including infants, children, and adults. The photographs come from various studios across the United States though the majority come from studios in New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Illinois. The photographs, since rehoused, were originally housed in two albums decorated with an intricate relief on the cover and a metal clasp lock.

Collection consists of a corrected carbon typescript of a review article. The article, written by Acorn Milton, discusses the writings of Al Purdy and Irving Layton, as well as the use of poetics in writing.

A small notebook containing clippings of reviews, advertisements, and articles from Journal des Bals, La Danse and manuscripts of articles by G. Desrat regarding various types of dance (such as ancient Greek dancing, Scottish dancing, the cotillion, waltz, minuet, and the quadrille), along with handwritten notes. Also included in the fonds are three leaves of documents relating to the origin of the notebook and sources of the article clippings contained inside.

Notebook containing diagrams of 84 contredanses with written annotations, circa 1780. Diagrams show the step by step movements of specific types of dances such as La Camille, Les Caprices de Chantenany, Les Cerises de Montmorenci, and Le Retour de Blanchard.

List of Contredanses included in Notebook:

1. La Camille
2. Les Deux Amies
3. La Zemia
4. La Labotiere
5. La Caprices Indiens
6. La Legere
7. L'Aufantine
8. L'été
9. La Nouvelle Etienne
10. La Nouvelle Monaco
11. L'Anglaise
12. Paule et Virginie
13. Lew Tembourins Picards
14. L'Union Intime
15. Les Trois Amis
16. La Champete
17. Les Caprices de Chantenany
18. Les Folies de Roncé
19. Les fête Villageoise
20. La Crécy
21. Les Plaisirs de Warennes
22. La Juno
23. La Petite Chasse
24. La Colbert
25. La Victoire de Cobourg
26. La Princesse d'Orange
27. La Rosalie
28. Le Duc d'Yorck
29. La Coalisée
30. L'arrivée du P. d'Orange
31. L'Espangnole
32. La Belle Elizabeth
33. Les Plaisirs d'Irlande
34. Carlalez [?]
35. La Julie
    4o. La Tulipano
36. Le Retour Autrichien
37. L'Arrivée de l'Empereur
38. Les Cerises de Montmorenci
39. La Yacinte
40. La Belle Annete
41. Les Bons Amis
42. La Simplicie
43. Les Plaisirs d'Alançon
44. La Figaro
45. La Fille à Nicolas
46. L'inconnu à la Redoute
47. La Belle Poûlé
48. Le Plaisir de Chatenet
49. La Satisfaction
50. La Chinoise
51. La Petite Charmante
52. Le goût du jour
53. La Guchen
54. Le Plaisir de Basque
55. La Pastorale
56. La Charboniere
57. Les nouveaux capricieu
58. La Redoute
59. La Vandeuie
60. L'Enfant Trompeur
61. La Petite Savoyarde
62. Luca
63. Les hannetons [?]
64. Le Depart Indien
65. La Chasse d'Amour
66. Les Dettes
67. La Nouvelle Eté
68. La Tarare
69. Le Portaille Anglois
70. Le Caprice de Erevan
71. Les Amourettes
72. Les Pantalon
73. La Neuville
74. La Monaco
75. L'Elisabeth
76. La Fête villageoise
77. L'Infortuné
78. Le Retour de Blanchard
79. [Untitled]

Fonds consists of twelve daily diaries, intermittently spanning between 1907 and 1948, that contain entries pertaining to daily farm operations. Included, though unrelated, are two ledgers from a Berlin (Kitchener), Ontario general store for the years 1893 and 1907. Accounts listed include purchases by John King, father of William Lyon Mackenzie King, that help document the lifestyle of the King family while living at Woodside, now a National Historic Site.

Collection contains prints of Canadian landscapes done by William Henry Bartlett in 1841 and portraits of prominent 17th and 18th century politicians from Europe and Canada. Also included are letters from English prime ministers dating around the 1700s. The collection is arranged in one series consisting of print engravings, a file of Bartlett prints, and a scrapbook containing letters.

Fonds consists of seventeen documents relating to the Jardine family, dating from 1797 to 1927, including correspondence, character references, certificates of marriage, articles of partnership, and one will.

Manuscript poem entitled, "On Parting from My Sister and Her Children." Also included are two pencil drawings, one of which depicts a church and graveyard scene in a village located three miles from Dublin. The poem and drawings have been bound into a book. In the front cover of the book is a newspaper clipping of an obituary for Isabella Jane and Caroline Olivia Clare.

Collection contains two poems. The first is a holograph poem, titled "Acceptance", which was written a short time before the death of Padraig O Broin and later published in Folio magazine. The second is a typed poem titled "Paraphrases from the Irish - James Stephens".

Fonds contains a record book belonging to Mary Augusta Fiske. The book contains recipes for cakes, sauces, and puddings. Also contains household accounts and several diary entries dating between 1876 and 1887. Attached to the inside of the front cover is a sepia toned photograph of an unidentified child. Next to it is a newspaper clipping regarding the death of Fiske titled "Death of Mrs. Gen. William O. Fiske".

Materials created and accumulated by Barbara Smucker relating to her professional activities. Primarily includes materials relating to her various published works including research, reviews, and manuscripts and typescripts.

Typescript lectures given during séances held under the supervision of medium Thomas Lacey in Waterloo, Kitchener, and Hamilton from 1934 to 1951. Some lectures and a press clipping featuring a letter to the editor against capital punishment written by Thomas Lacey are contained within a scrapbook. Lectures range from various topics including life and death, peace, Gandhi, and spiritualism.

More than 2 million negatives taken between 1938 and 2001 by staff photographers at the Kitchener-Waterloo Record (KWR) and its predecessors. Providing a historical look at the Region of Waterloo, the Collection includes documentary photographs of local news events, community activities, regional development, human-interest stories, businesses, schools, and sports teams. Portraits of business and community leaders, as well as commissioned photos taken for advertising purposes, are part of the Collection. It also includes scrapbooks containing clippings and pictures that appeared in the paper from 1971 to 1995.

Original accession includes over 115 Heitmatbücher (German for "home books") that document the stories and histories of the villages that were inhabited by the Danube Swabians (German: Donauschwaben) in Central Europe: Romania, Hungary, and the former Yugoslavia. Many of these books also contain genealogies, some dating back to the 18th century. The Heimatbücher are a unique and rich resource for anyone interested in the history and migration of the Donauschwaben people.

An addition to the Henry Fischer Schwaben Heimatbuch Collection contains 13 items documenting the history and genealogy of Donauschwaben people living in southeastern Europe. Many of the titles are rare, having been created by and for the communities and published in only small print runs.

A genealogist, Mr. Fischer has devoted much of his life to documenting the history of his people and to collecting these Heitmatbücher.

Special Collections & Archives holds a variety of town guides from cities across the UK. Most significant urban centres in the British Isles are represented, and there is a comprehensive collection of guides to places which became Greater London in 1965.

The guides can provide a benchmark for assessing the very substantial changes which have affected British urban places in the past 60 years, and may be of interest to researchers in a variety of disciplines.

The town guides vary in size from a slender brochure of 30 pages for a small Urban District to large-format volumes of over 300 pages for a major City and County Borough such as Liverpool.

The William Blake Collection consists of more than 200 titles of which the majority are facsimiles of Blake's works or privately-printed reprints and editions containing facsimiles of the illustrations. The collection also forms part of a larger collection devoted to joint painter-illustrator-author books that include followers of Blake, e.g. Palmer & Calvert, William Morris, Eric Gill, and David Jones.

One of the highlights of the William Blake Collection is the 1951 Trianon Press edition of William Blake's Jerusalem.

Artists’ books (defined as: books or book-like objects over the final appearance of which an artist has had a high degree of control; where the book is intended as a work of art in itself) can be located using the library catalogue. Authors include Palmer & Calvert, William Morris, and David Jones.

All items in this collection are located in Special Collections & Archives and are non-circulating.

Many of the holdings of Special Collections & Archives represent fine bindings, unique bindings and the works of famous printers and binders. Examples include signed bindings, metal, velvet and papier-mache bindings, and bindings by well-known bookbinders such as Joseph Zaehnsdorf, and Sangorski & Sutcliffe.

The B.M. Bower Western Novels Collection, acquired in 2015, consists of over 70 American western novels written by Bertha Muzzy Sinclair (known as B.M. Bower) and her husband Bertrand Sinclair. Many of the books in this collection also feature pictorial cover art.

The British Women's Periodicals Collection is made up of some 35,000 issues of British women's magazines published from 1893 to 1977. The majority of titles were published by the Amalgamated Press and publishers which it absorbed, and many copies are, in fact, copies from the publishers' own archives. Most titles in the collection are very rare.

Because these magazines were aimed at a mass market audience, the British Women's Periodicals Collection offers a unique opportunity to examine the interests and concerns of British women during the time period covered. The collection's content is primarily "popular" fiction written for a female audience, but magazines for children and youth are also well represented. Cooking, crafts, advice columns, fashion, health, and inspirational topics are also featured. Of particular interest are the advertisements, which illustrate contemporary attitudes in a vivid manner.

The nucleus of this collection, begun by the University of Waterloo's first dean of Graduate Studies, Dr. R. Stanton and the University's first librarian, Mrs. Doris Lewis, during the 1960's, is 45 editions of Euclid's Elements of Geometry The collection has continued to be developed as a special collection. A collection of 110 nineteenth century mathematics books was acquired in 1981.

The earliest edition of Euclid's Elements of Geometry is dated 1505. The collection includes the first translation of the Elements into a modern language (1543), the first English language edition (1570), the Byrne edition, using coloured printing (Pickering, 1847), and the first edition printed in France (1516).

The collection includes 9 of the 46 editions listed by Thomas-Stanford in his Early Editions of Euclid's Elements (which lists editions published prior to 1600), some of which are of "great rarity" according to Thomas-Stanford. The collection is particularly useful in showing the transmission and teaching of the Elements from almost the earliest printed form to modern texts. Unusual methods of presenting geometry are represented in books with movable stand-up diagrams from the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, and the "Pickering Euclid" of 1847, which uses colours rather than letters to describe theorems.

The Doris Lewis Rare Book Room houses a sizeable special collection of rare materials related to the history of dance and ballet. The nucleus of the dance collection is the 150 items donated in 1975 by Dr. Henry Crapo, a former University of Waterloo faculty member. Dr. Crapo has continued to support the collection over the years.

Dr. Crapo's donation contains some rare and beautiful works on ballet: works by Negri, Caroso, Noverre, De la Cuisse, Arena, Dumanoir, Blasis and Bakst. The subject strengths of the collection reflect Dr. Crapo's interests in choreography and dance notation.

Of the seventeenth-century materials found here, some of the finest are Negri's Nuove inventioni de balli (Milan: 1604); Caroso's Nobilita di Dame (Venice: 1605), and Du Manoir's Le mariage de la musique avec la dance (1664).

The largest addition to the dance collection was the 300-volume collection acquired with the assistance of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grant in 1982. This collection, with imprints ranging in date from 1687 to the mid-twentieth century, adds a new research dimension in the form of illustrated works containing lithographs and engravings of the period of the Romantic ballet. The provenance of the majority of works in this collection--a portion of the personal library of George Chaffee--a leading dance writer of the twentieth century, accounts in part for its strength. Many of the books Chaffee consulted in his research for his most famous writings on ballet are now a part of the Waterloo collections.

In 1985, another grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council made it possible for the Library to purchase over two dozen books supportive of the Crapo Collection.

Special Collections & Archives has prepared a digital exhibit featuring some of the items from the Henry H. Crapo Dance Collection.

Collected by Gustav Seide, this collection includes primarily works by 19th century German mystic Jakob Lorber and his circle such as Gottfried Mayerhofer. Also included are works by other mystics including Emanuel Swedenborg and religious texts including the Bhagavad Gita. Of particular note is a complete set of Lorber’s seminal work “Das große Evangelium Johannis” of the Great Gospel of John.

The collection consists of 169 paperback books featuring Lesbian themes.

During the post-war period, from the late 1940's to the 1960's, a significant amount of Lesbian material became available amidst the proliferation of popular fiction published as paperback originals (sometimes referred to as "pulp" fiction). Some authors represented in this collection are: Ann Bannon, Paula Christian, Valerie Taylor, Artemis Smith, Randy Salem, March Hastings, Gale Wilhelm, Marion Zimmer Bradley (writing under the names Lee Chapman and Miriam Gardner), and Marijane Meaker (writing under the names Ann Aldrich and Vin Packer).

The collection consists of 350 titles from the personal library of the philosopher and man of letters, George Santayana (1863-1952). The subject focus of this portion of Santayana's library, purchased by the University of Waterloo Library during the 1960's, could be characterized as interdisciplinary, with works in philosophy, literature, religion, and history. Many of the books were presented to Santayana by their authors. The collection is supplemented by reference and critical materials related to the life and work of Santayana as well as editions of Santayana's own writings. First or early editions of most of Santayana's works are included.

One of the most interesting and significant features of the Library of George Santayana is that many of the books from his personal library contain annotations in his own handwriting. These notes reveal his opinions and thoughts about the writings of others. The collection includes Santayana's own copies of his three-volume autobiography, with his corrections and notes to his publisher.

This collection is made up of 25 first or early editions of the 35 titles by Virginia Woolf as well as 62 titles printed by the Hogarth Press. 47 of the Hogarth Press items date from the 1917-1938 period during which Virginia Woolf was associated with the Press.

Highlights of the collection include a first edition of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, and its sequel, Three Guineas, and first editions of her last two novels.

This is a representative collection that contains one example from each of most of the different series (for example, the Day to Day series, Hogarth Letters, Hogarth Essays), and examples of very early printings of some 20th century writers, such as Robert Graves, Edith Sitwell, and Gertrude Stein.

The B.P. Nichol Library of Science Fiction, acquired in 1990, consists of more than 500 science fiction titles from the private library of the late Canadian writer, B.P. Nichol (commonly referred to as bpNichol).

Many well-known science fiction authors' first works were issued only in paperback, and this collection includes many key titles in the science fiction genre which are extremely scarce today as a result of the vulnerability of the paperback format to deterioration. The books in this collection feature many striking examples of cover art.

The Women and Work collection consists of 74 contemporary British and European imprints which focus upon women and the workplace.

Included are autobiographical accounts, which range from Dorothy C. Keeley's The Crowded Stairs: Recollections of Social Work in Liverpool 1919-1940 (London: National Council of Social Services, 1961) to Sex work: Writings by Women in the Sex Industry (London: Virago Press, 1987). Other personal accounts include: The Life and Writing of a Working Woman (London: Virago Press, 1984) by Ada Nield Chew, which describes her work in the Women's Trade Union League and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom; and Front Line Heroines: Stories of Ten Soviet Women (Soviet War News, 1945).

Commentaries on women in the workplace are represented by such titles as Women in Industry: a Marx House Syllabus (Southampton: Lawrence and Wishart Ltd., [n. d.]); Helping Women at Work: the Women's Industrial Council, 1889-1914 (London: Hutchison, 1985); and Willing Hearts and Ready Hands: the Labours and Triumphs of Earnest Women (London: Nelson, 1883).

A collection of seven zines created by Jenna Rose Sands on topics including cultural appropriation, residential schools, missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, Pow Wow etiquette and the 60s scoop. Much of the artwork is hand-drawn and includes collage work.