Carbon typescript transcript of Arthur Lang's diary prepared as a Christmas souvenir in 1907 by T.A. Lang in Clearfield, Pennsylvania. It includes a copy of a letter from one of Arthur Lang's granddaughters, giving some family background. Arthur Lang describes the sea voyage, scenery, and passengers on trip from Montreal, through the Lachine Rapids, to Prescott, Ontario. The diary also discusses Lang’s experiences inspecting land near the townships of Ramsay, Lanark, and Dalhousie in Lanark County, Ontario.

Consists of Marion Conroy's copies of material given to delegates at the National Conference of Regional Chairmen, Consumer Branch, Wartime Prices and Trade Board held in 1944, and includes the agenda and outline of issues for the Conference, as well as a separate report submitted by Kate Aitken, Supervisor of the Conservation Programme, on the establishment and progress across Canada of "Remake Centres." These centres were for teaching women to conserve new yard goods by making over existing garments.

The fonds also contains a scrapbook kept by Marion Conroy of clippings and ephemera dating from 1941-1944. As well as documenting Marion Conroy's activities, the scrapbook contains information on the organization and personalities involved in the Board and the Consumer Branch, such Donald Gordon and Byrne Hope Sanders. Also present are news accounts of the many rules and regulations applied to all aspects of the production and consumption of consumer goods, from fashion, food and drink, and housing, to the delivery and return of purchased goods.

Collection consists of seven legal documents regarding the sale of land in the Township of Dumfries in Southern Ontario.

File list:

1. Deed of land between Aaron White and Joseph Dorland -100 acres (Hallowell Township) – June 5, 1818
2. Deed of land between between William Dickson and William Otis - 50 acres – May 9, 1831
3. Deed of land between between William Dickson and John Campbell - 315 1/3 acres – July 14, 1832
4. Deed of land between between William Dickson and Jacob Kinsey - 150 acres – April 25, 1833
5. Deed of land between between William Dickson and John Fraser - 50 acres – October 1, 1834
6. Deed of land between between William Dickson - Levi Howell, 25 acres – April 16, 1834
7. Receipt for Joseph Pettengall from the Commissioner for Crown Lands - 100 acres (Hillier Township) – June 6 1839

Fonds consists of material relating to the history and operations of the Kitchener-Waterloo Record, from its beginnings in 1878 to 1988. Also consists of historical materials on the history of Waterloo County and the Region of Waterloo including newspaper articles, slides, photographs, and negatives. Includes legal documents, clippings, ephemera, publications, artifacts, office files, photographic materials, and films.

Fonds consists of materials created and accumulated by the Kitchener Waterloo Sales and Ad Club relating to their services, events, organization and history.

Fonds consists of textual and visual materials created and received by Dorney over the course of his career, including drafts and reprints of most of his published writings, teaching and course materials, audio-visual materials, framed items, ephemera and realia. Of interest is an original map by Dorney which attempts to reconstruct the original vegetation patterns in North Dumfries Township in Waterloo County in the 19th century. Dorney's collection of slides is particularly significant in its documentation of natural vegetation, urban impact and areas of ecological interest both locally and elsewhere and includes extensive documentation of the "mini-forest" at his home at 124 Amos Ave. in Waterloo.

Collection consists of materials relating to the personal and professional life of Marie Stopes as well as to the history of birth control. Includes biographical materials, articles and ephemera related to birth control, correspondence, and ms. drafts of a biography of Stopes by Ruth Hall.

The records of K-W Oktoberfest document all aspects of the growth and day-to-day operation of the festival from its beginnings in 1969. They consist of incoming and outgoing correspondence, committee minutes and reports, publications, ephemera, audio-visual materials, and other material created or received by the Corporation in the course of its business. Records from 1969-1983 are incomplete.

Collection consists mainly of items relating to the history of Ontario, with some items relating to other parts of Canada, the United States and Europe. Includes correspondence, documents, land grants, leaflets, pamphlets, clippings, maps, photographs, etchings and ephemera.

Fonds consists of textual and graphic materials created or accumulated by members of the Clement and Bowlby families, largely photographs of extended family members and materials created or accumulated by William Pope Clement and Florence Grace Clement. Also contains clippings, correspondence, genealogical records and research, textiles, artifacts including First World War medals, and other ephemera.

Fonds primarily focuses on Jo Davis' work as co-founder, vice-president, etc., of the Canadian women's group known as the "Voice of Women". Davis was actively involved from 1960 to 1963. The group still exists but Davis is no longer involved.

Included here are correspondence, memos, briefs, speeches and clippings which document the change in focus of the group from its early years--a change which ultimately resulted in Davis' resignation (January 22, 1963). Included on many folders or individual pieces of correspondence are Davis' notes, done in 1990, which reveal a unique perspective of early events.

The fonds also contains groups of papers documenting Davis' interests prior to her work with the Voice of Women (World Refugee Year), projects concomitant with VOW activities (Canadian Peace Research Institute and lnternational Cooperation Year) and projects subsequent to VOW activities (Harold King Farm and French Week). Small amounts of materials relate to Davis' current interests such as The Turnaround Decade Group.

Materials relating to the personal and professional life of the Motz family spanning over one hundred and fifty years and four generations. Also included is materials relating to their family work in the newspaper industry in Kitchener. Includes personal records of John Motz, his son William John, and his grandchildren John George and John Edward as well as their respective wives. Also includes materials related to Rittinger and Motz, and the various newspaper that were owned and operated by the company. Materials include photographs, biographical records, correspondence, clippings, legal documents, stationary and a scrapbook.

Material documenting the career of Nazla Dane primarily through clippings, diaries and copies of her published works as well as through scrapbooks of and writings about her.

Correspondence, legal documents, photographs, ephemera and genealogical records, relating to Jacob Hailer (1804-1885), Henry Wagner (1793-1867), Jacob Wagner (1824-1858), Louis Henry Wagner (1857-1945), their families and the related Staebler Family, Biehn/Bean Family and Breithaupt Family.

Fonds contains a notebook and records collected by Minnie O'Hara Maines from 1948 to 1971 in her capacity as a member of the Executive of the Kitchener-Waterloo Council of Friendship. There are blank forms regarding tax deductions and employment contracts for English-speaking classes, along with newspaper clippings that cover registration for and advertisements of these classes in Kitchener. The fonds also includes other promotional pamphlets and cards for the classes and for the Council in general, along with lists of winners for the Council's scholarship funds and names of contributors.

Fonds consists of material created, published, and accumulated by Annie Elizabeth May Hewlett. Includes a scrapbook and correspondence.

Correspondence, manuscripts and typescripts of poetry and prose , clippings of published work and reviews. Correspondents include Nellie McClung (2 letters), Laura Goodman Salverson (1 letter) and Charles G.D. Roberts (1 letter).

Fonds consists of materials created and accumulated by the Architectural Conservancy of Ontario : North Waterloo Region Branch. Includes operational files including minutes and finances, project and event files and ephemera, as well as a large body of subject and clipping files on local buildings, environmental bodies, and heritage organizations.

File consists of one typed document (computer output) with pencil markings.

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.