Rare Book Room

The Rare Book Room houses the Library’s special collections. Material is available by appointment only. Give us a call at 860-542-5075.

The special collections include volumes from the initial library collection, established in 1889 by Isabella Eldridge, founder of the Library. At the core of the initial collection, numbering close to 1,400 titles, was the personal library of Isabella’s uncle the Reverend Dr. Azariah Eldridge (1820-1888) of Yarmouth, Massachusetts, an intellectual and scholar. Theology dominated, but there were also standard works on almost every topic. Pasted inside the cover of each book is Eldridge’s book plate. Among the oldest of the surviving books is the three-volume set of the works of Seneca, annotated by the 17th-century German-Dutch scholar Johann Gronovius, bound in vellum and published in 1649.

Norfolk Library Rare Book Room

The works of Seneca, 1649

Many authors visited Norfolk in the early years of the 20th century and donated their autographed books to the Library. Robert E. Peary presented a signed volume of his book Northward Over the “Great Ice” (1898) after his first visit in 1905. Two years later, his second visit was postponed by a snowstorm. Other autographed copies include My Year in a Log Cabin by William Dean Howells (1893); Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (Brunswick ed., 1893), presented and inscribed by her sister Isabella Beecher Hooker, 1904; and The Most Interesting American by Julian Street (1916).

The Library’s special collections were enhanced in 1953 with the addition of the Frederick Sprague Barbour collection of hunting and fishing books, given by Frederick K. Barbour, an avid sportsman, and his wife Helen Carrère Barbour. The Barbours were Norfolk summer residents, having been invited here by Helen’s cousins, Reginald and Beatrice Carrère Rowland. Like many of the early summer residents, Reg Rowland and Fred Barbour were attracted to Norfolk for its excellent forests, plentiful with birds and deer, and crystal-clear rivers, ponds, and lakes, filled with trout, perch, pickerel, and bass. The Barbours’ son Frederick shared his father’s interests, and, when he died of bulbar polio in 1952 at age 24, the Frederick Sprague Barbour Collection was donated in his memory. The collection numbers over 300 volumes of sporting books.

Catalogue of the Norfolk Library, 1890

Prairie and Forest, Parker Gillmore (W.H. Allen & Co., London, 1881)

The special collections include early Norfolk Library catalogs and visitor registers; Norfolk histories and family memorial books: Registers for the State of Connecticut (1793 – 1865); historic photographs; The Chimes periodicals (1896-1900); and Isabella Eldridge correspondence among other early library documents.

Five Grolier Club medallions were given to the Library by Grolier Club member and Norfolk resident Henry H. Bridgman when they were issued: Nathaniel A. Hawthorne (modeled by Ringel Dillzach, 1892); James Russell Lowell (modeled by Charles Calverley, 1895, cast in bronze by John Williams); Ralph Waldo Emerson (modeled by Victor David Brenner, 1909, cast in bronze by John Williams); Edgar Allan Poe (modeled by Edith Woodman Burroughs, 1909, cast in bronze by John Williams; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (modeled by John Flanagan, 1911, cast in bronze by Griffoul Foundry).