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.

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.

The collection centres on Robert Southey and Bristol and gives an overview of the social, political, and literary upheaval which gave birth to the Romantic movement and shaped the rest of the nineteenth century. The collection also contains material on Spain, Portugal and Brazil, Russia and Napoleon, France and the Revolution, as well as numerous works on travel in the British Isles and elsewhere. Also present is a selection of twentieth-century works which elucidate Bertram Davis' interests, friendships, and scholarly connections.

Almost all of Robert Southey's published works are represented, and almost all of these are in the first edition. Several works were formerly owned by Robert Southey.

The University of Waterloo has published a catalogue of the collection: Catalogue of the Bertram R. Davis "Robert Southey" Collection compiled by Jane Britton (PR4467 .U55x 1990).

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 bpNichol Library of Science Fiction, acquired in 1990, consists of more than 500 science fiction titles from the private library of the late Canadian writer, Barrie Phillip 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 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 research collection maintained by the Coalition during its 10-year existence consists of approximately 350 books and periodicals, ranging from government reports to ephemeral publications.

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 (D0128). Another early Latin edition (D1029) is dated 1510. This unique work is also bound in a palimpsest parchment, which shows traces of effaced Hebrew text. This particular edition is also a so-called "ghost edition" where for many years bibliographies listed it as having been printed in the year 1515, a mistake in reading the date in the colophon.

The collection includes the first translation of the Elements into a modern language (1543, D0126), and the first edition printed in France (1516, D0272).

The first English language edition (1570, D0127) is an important edition that features pop-up figures of polyhedrons to help learners visualize Euclidean shapes. It is also includes the most comprehensive notes on Euclid to that point, also written by translator Henry Billingsley. The preface is also of note, as it was written by John Dee, alchemist and more to Queen Elizabeth I. The printer was John Daye, one of the preeminent printers of Post-Reformation England. At some point in the lived history of the book conservation work was done and binder's waste in the form of 14th century mss were discovered.

One of the most famous forays into pedagogical experimentation is the Byrne edition, using coloured printing (1847, G1947). Created by mathematician Oliver Byrne, it covers the first 6 books of Euclid's Elements of Geometry, and attempts to present Euclid's proofs in terms of pictures using only primary colours. It was published by William Pickering and printed by Chiswick Press. Although it was, and still is, considered an important item in the history of printing, it unfortunately directly contributed to the bankruptcy of the firm six years later.

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.

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 Grand River Conservation Authority Library was donated in 2005, accompanying the archival records of the Authority and its predecessors.

The Library was maintained at the GRCA headquarters for reference and research use and consists of works by and about the GRCA, including both internal and external reports and studies, periodicals, and monographs.

Unpublished library items are described as part of the GRCA archives while published items are catalogued as print material and are listed in the library catalogue.

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.

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 Indigenous publications collection is a selection of published holdings held by Special Collections & Archives related to Indigenous peoples in Canada and abroad. with a primary focus on First Nations, Inuit, Métis communities. The collection consist of of books, periodicals, zines, and other published materials, produced by, about, and in the language(s) of various Indigenous peoples and communities.

Titles in this collection are varied in topic and will be of interest to those interested in grassroots activism, self-determination governance, land rights and stewardship, community building, and settler and religious colonialism.

Included are some 1400 items which document the history of women through biographies and memoirs, literature, historical works, and records of women's organizations in Canada and elsewhere. Highlights among the older works in the collection include an 1852 edition of Roughing it in the Bush, by Susanna Moodie; the 1879 edition of Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe; and the 1836 edition of The Backwoods of Canada, by Catherine Parr Traill.

The University of Waterloo has issued a catalogue of the collection: A Catalogue of the Lady Aberdeen Library on the History of Women in the University of Waterloo Library, compiled by Jane Britton (Waterloo, Ont.: University of Waterloo Library, 1982).

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).

This collection, funded by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and Kaufman Footwear of Kitchener, Ont., consists of about 400 items published between 1906 and the 1980's related to the British birth control pioneer, Dr. Marie Stopes. A collection of archival material, the Marie Stopes archive, complements the book collection.

Included are first and scarce editions of Marie Stopes' writings on contraception, her early works in the fields of botany and geology, as well as much of her literary output. First and variant editions of her best-known books, Married Love, and Wise Parenthood, both published in 1918, are also present. The collection includes first editions of Stopes' first two published works, The Study of Plant Life for Young People (London, 1906, call number F9984), and Ancient Plants (London, 1910, call number G7956).

The collection contains an extensive selection of supporting materials about contraception and family planning by other authors. Highlights include Annie Besant's pamphlet, Law of Population (London: n.d., call number F11010), early issues of the journal, Birth Control News (call number HQ763.B46x), L. Darwin's What is Eugenics (1932, call number F9966), and W. J. Robinson's Fewer and Better Babies (New York: 1934, call number F10053).

The Private Press book collection includes items from more than 1,000 presses in Canada, Great Britain, and the United States. This collection has been developed as a representative collection, with intensive coverage of selected presses, such as Hague & Gill, St. Dominic's Press, Nonesuch Press, and Golden Cockerel Press, to provide scope for in-depth study of the history and development of these particular presses. A sample selection from a wide range of other private presses gives an overview of the private press movement in the twentieth century.

The Rosa Breithaupt Clark Architectural Collection is the result of an endowment made by Herbert Spencer Clark in 1982 in memory of his late wife, Rosa Breithaupt Hewetson Clark, formerly of Kitchener. Included in purchases made through this endowment are exemplary treatises from the sixteenth to the twentieth century supportive of the School of Architecture's cultural history emphasis.

Awards made in 1987 and 1990 by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada under their programme supporting the development of specialized research programmes enabled the collections to grow significantly. The first grant was dedicated to the purchase of landmark titles in the history and theory of architecture. Since the discourse of architecture ultimately looks back to the Roman writer, Vitruvius, it was appropriate that the first acquisition using these funds was a rare edition of a Vitruvian treatise printed in 1536.

The second of the SSHRC grants was awarded in 1990 specifically to support the collection in an area of critical importance: architectural developments in Northern Europe and on the North American frontier which have a profound effect on architectural theory and urban development in Canada.

A third award made by SSHRC allowed the Library to purchase The Dictionary of Architecture issued by the Architectural Publication Society (1853-1892), described as a monument to nineteenth-century scholarship.

The Sol Eisen Collection of Canadiana is a collection of 179 rare, and in some cases, previously unrecorded, books, pamphlets, and printed ephemera from Quebec, Ontario, and Western Canada. The collection was presented to the University of Waterloo Library by Morton Eisen of Toronto in 1993. Sol Eisen (1898-1974), a Toronto lawyer, first began his "collecting hobby" with baseball cards in 1911. The focus of his collection eventually turned to rare books, and the variety and quality of the material he acquired are testimony to the diligence and enthusiasm with which he pursued his hobby.

Highlights of the Sol Eisen Collection of Canadiana include its earliest imprint, Nehiro-Iriniui Aiamihe Massinahigan (1767), a book of prayers and catechism for the Montagnais Indians by the Jesuit missionary, Jean Baptiste de La Brosse. This is one of the few books ever to be printed in the Montagnais dialect. Also important among the early imprints is, Traite de la loi des fiefs (1775), a compilation of four publications by Francois Cugnet which sets forth the basic principles of the civil law of the French Regime (still in force in the Province of Quebec).

Several imprints are of great rarity. Included in this category are a children's book printed in Brockville in 1826 entitled, First Book for Children; an 1839 edition of Wilson's Border Tales; and two previously unknown almanacs, The Upper Canada Almanac and Provincial Calendar for the Year of Our Lord 1831, and The Toronto Farmers' and Mechanicks' Almanack for the Year of Our Lord 1838. Other items not noted in the standard bibliographies include an 1879 broadside printed in Winnipeg entitled, A Grand Display of Manitoba Products ... Selected for the Ottawa Exhibition. Only one other copy is known to exist of Swift's York County Almanac for the Year 1832, which is also of interest by virtue of its printer, William Lyon MacKenzie.

Other notable items include two books printed in the Cree language at Moose Factory, one in 1896, and the other in 1859.

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.

The William Dendy Library consists of more than 3,500 books and 2,500 periodical issues. For the most part, the collection focuses on the history of architecture, but other topics, such as music and literature, are featured as well.

The library of the Toronto Branch of the Canadian Women's Press Club is made up of presentation copies of books written by and donated by the club's members in addition to books published by significant Canadian women writers. There are over 200 books in the collection.

Included are works by such well-known figures as Mabel Dunham, Emily Murphy, Marjorie Freeman Campbell, Lucy Maud Montgomery, and Katherine Hale. Also present are a number of books presented to the club by notable Canadian figures. Included are a copy of John Buchan's The Three Hostages, which he presented on October 23, 1924 "in memory of a delightful visit", Igor Gouzenko's The Fall of a Titan, which contains not only a lengthy presentation inscription but also a sketch done by him, and a signed copy of the first Canadian edition of Mazo de la Roche's Jalna.

Also included are a number of scarce children's stories in a Canadian setting, a copy of The National Ballet autographed by Margot Fonteyn, and an early biographical directory, Morgan's Types of Canadian Women, published in 1903.